On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a tutorial posted from Francesco Malaesta about the Laravel Doctrine project, wondering if it's the best of both worlds for connecting to databases and working with entities in your Laravel-based project.

Laravel Doctrine is a drop-in implementation of the famous ORM for the Laravel 5.X Framework, and a really interesting alternative to the default choice, Eloquent. In this article, we will learn how to use it, and when.

He starts with a comparison of the two options - Doctrine vs Eloquent - and why you might choose the former over the latter. He then gets into the installation of a new Laravel project and pulling in the laravel-doctrine/orm package. He then shows it in action with a simple to-do list application, creating an entity for the tasks. From there he shows the use of the EntityManager to add a new task and find ones matching certain criteria. He makes a TaskController to handle the route functionality and creates the matching frontend views to allow the user to define new tasks. Also included is the code for the other "CRUD" (create, read, update, delete) handling for the tasks and the addition of the relationship between users and tasks.