In this new post to the symfony blog, there's an update on the framework's latest version, Propel integration and the addition of the sfDoctrinePlugin.

After more that two years of development, the Propel team has released Propel 1.3 yesterday. This is a great achievement as Propel 1.3 sports a lot a new exciting features.

These features include PDO integration, object instance pooling, improvements to the date handling features and the addition of more default values for database schemas. There's also the updates with Doctrine:

As announced in the symfony 1.2 roadmap, Doctrine 1.0 will be officially supported and the sfDoctrinePlugin will be bundled with symfony 1.2. Doctrine 1.0 beta1 has been released two weeks ago and the Doctrine team will release Doctrine 1.0 final on September 1st.

In this new post to his blog Stefan Koopmanschap looks at a plugin for the symfony framework that has him impressed.

Using this plugin, it is not necessary anymore to really care about which ORM you pick for your project. It's the thought behind symfony 1.1 taken into the symfony ORM-selection.

He points to the DbFinderPlugin as an alternative to rewriting up the ORM code for your application by hand (or in something like Propel or Doctrine). It makes switching between ORM layers simple - just a configuration change to point to the new system.

In the third part of the series dealing with using Doctrine in your PHP applications, ProDevTips has this third part looking at a method for extending the tool's current functionality.

I simply knew we would need the extension capability that the Mdl class allows for sooner or later, I didn't expect it to be this soon though. The main problem here is saving a many to many relationship straight to the database from the $_POST array, to do that we can extend Doctrine Record with a new function I have named fromArrayExt which adds something extra to the normal fromArray method.

He shows how to extend the classes to create custom handlers for a grouping of checkboxes. The new code automatically handles their submitted values and pushes them directly into the database (with a simple save() call).

Henrik has posted the second part of his look at using Doctrine, this time in combining it with Smarty. (Check out part one here).

We are creating an MVC setup where M is Doctrine, V is Smarty and C is our own stuff we do here. The Zend Framework has been reduced to just another component library for me now, I will pick goodies when I need them.

He shows how to be "empowered, not stifled" by the framework and to combine the two technologies in a flexible, lightweight platform. His example is a simple signup form that, on submit, saves the information to the database via the Doctrine layer.

Henrik waves goodbye to the Zend_Db component of the Zend Framework in this new post to the ProDevTips blog - his new favorite is Doctrine.

It was long overdue but finally I've taken a look at Doctrine. And I'm blown away, bye bye Zend DB. [...] It's time to try and convey how awesome I think Doctrine is.

His example sets up a table definition and defines the associations between the columns for a "members" table. He defines a "city" table too and shows how Doctrine can easily combine the two and make selecting from and inserting into the tables simple.

Francois Zeninotto has posted a comparison of three different ORM (Object Relational Mapping) layers for PHP - Propel, Doctrine and sfPropelFinder (the last being a plugin of the symfony framework).

When it comes to ORMs, it's all a matter of preference. Is it, really? This post compares side-by-side the code required to perform some simple operations with three OO database requesting API. The purpose is to demonstrate that productivity, and not only style, can vary a lot depending on the ORM you choose.

He's worked up a long list of examples including methods to:

• Retrieving an article by its primary key
• Retrieving the latest 5 articles
• Retrieving articles based on a complex AND/OR clause
• Retrieving articles authored by people of a certain group
• Retrieving an article and its category by the article primary key
• Retrieving articles and hydrating their author object and the author group

Each one comes with their own (usually simple) code. His conclusions point out different "bests" of each - like sfPropelFinder being the "most magic" and that some of the limits of Propel are very frustrating.

The Zend Developer Zone has linked to a tutorial from Ruben Vermeersch about how to get the Zend Framework and the Doctrine ORM library working together.

This article will guide you through the steps needed to set up a project using both the Zend Framework and Doctrine. In a step-by-step way, we will set up a simple message board application.

He includes introductory things like the folder structure and an example of having Doctrine installed inside of it. Its all code from there on out - the bootstrap file, setting up a global handler, and how to integrate it all into their simple ZF application.

Lukas Smith got a chance to catch up with Rasmus Lerdorf (and others in #php.pecl) and "talk shop" about topics including handling large libraries and maxclients settings.

In this first post I will provide a link and some commentary on Rasmus's points regarding Doctrine (note I left independent chatter in the log in order to not have any chance of me filtering the content, but there is very little of that so I hope the discussion is still easy enough to follow).

On the Zend Developer Zone, jonwage has posted about an ORM (Object-Relational mapping) he came across that can help abstract out your interface with your backend database - Doctrine.

One of its key features is the ability to optionally write database queries in an OO (object oriented) SQL-dialect called DQL inspired by Hibernates HQL. This provides developers with a powerful alternative to SQL that maintains a maximum of flexibility without requiring needless code duplication.

The project's page gives the full details on the features it offers and has links to the latest downloads so you can try it out for yourself. There's even a blog you can subscribe to to keep up to date.

From the Spindrop blog, there's a quick new post that shares the code needed to save a file to a database inside of a symfony application:

I like to save content uploaded by website visitors to a database versus the file system. It makes it easy having the data all in one spot. I tend to overcomplicate this process, so I wanted to write down the important steps.

His two step process involves modifying your application's form helper and the code to pull the binary data out of the submit and push it into a new object.