A recent post on the Developer Tutorials blog takes a look at a fundamental part of several of the PHP (and other language) frameworks out there - the Object Relational Mapping (ORM) layer for database access.

Instead of direct database access, an ORM layer in a PHP framework can make "objects" stored in a database behave like actual objects from a programming perspective - for example, creating a new "car" stored in the database could involve a call to $car->new(). By abstracting actual database access, web development can be more productive and result in more reliable applications. Here's a quick intro to ORM in PHP.

They talk about ORM's role in how applications interface with data (abstracted out to objects) and some examples of it in current frameworks - CakePHP and Symfony.

The Oracle Technology Network has a new article posted looking at a basic application that combines the power of an Oracle database with the flexibility of the Symfony framework.

Where should someone who wants to learn Symfony begin? Project Symfony has a very informative and well-kept Web site, with extensive documentation. As it turns out, there is a book about Symfony and there are also numerous tutorials-unfortunately all of them created using a MySQL database. That is, in essence, why I decided to write this article about Symfony and Oracle. It's not a full-blown tutorial, but I hope it will be helpful to those who want to use Symfony with Oracle.

The sample application uses the latest version of Symfony, an Apache web server and the Zend Core for Oracle to install and configure the needed setup. The bulk of the tutorial is taken up with examples of how to tell the ORM layer of Symfony about your database tables and how to build the default classes from them.

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 PHP::Impact blog has pointed out a new bit of software that can help you get your social networking application "up and running in minutes" - Symfonians.

Symfonians is an open source (CC-BY-SA 3.0 licensed) project-centric social networking web application written in PHP5 and based on the Symfony framework (1.0 stable version is used). The code has been extracted from the Symfonians.net application.

Lots of features are included like an applications directory, a job offers catalog, weblog management, maps and geolocation and support for microformats. Check out the project's site for prerequisites and quick install information (via subversion).

On the PHP::Impact blog, Federico Cargnelutti has posted about test-driven design, specifically with the Symfony framework.

Symfony is one of the few PHP frameworks that gives you basic tools for starting to write tests. [...] Symfony also provides an extension of this class called sfTestBrowser, designed especially for functional tests, which has all the abilities of the sfBrowser object plus some smart assert methods.

He uses this sfTestBrowser object to run an example test on a same get() call's response. It should match the regular expression of "/This is a temporary page/" but doesn't so it fails. Writing up tests like this for new parts of your application first would be considered test-driven development and the Symfony framework makes that simple.

According to this new post to the Symfony blog, fans of the framework have a new reason to be happy - the latest version, 1.1, has officially been released.

As you may know, we have been working for a very long time on the next stable version of symfony. Now the day has come to celebrate the immediate availability of the long awaited 1.1 stable release of the symfony framework!

Just some of the new features include the framework's new architecture, its brand new YAML parser, the bundling of Propel as a plugin and the addition of over 8,500 functional tests to ensure the solid structure of the framework stands.

You can either update/install this latest version with the pear command line functionality or download the package directly from the site.

Roshan Bhattarai has set up an informal poll in an entry on his site asking visitors to rate what they think the "best" PHP framework is.

I've been asked a lot of times which is the best PHP framework. Well, it's a very difficult question to answer this question and there are some pros and corns in each framework. So, today I would to hear your views via poll.

Included in the list are CakePHP, Symfony, Zend Framework, CodeIgniter. Coming out with around forty-three percent of the votes, though, is the Zend Framework with CakePHP following with twenty-two percent.

Prior to their release of the next big jump in the Symfony framework, Fabien Potencier wanted to introduce people to the new version and what they can expect.

Apart from the new exciting features we have in symfony 1.1, this version also represents a year of hard work to refactor the internals. Let's dig into symfony internals a bit!

They talk about the new platform that everything is built of off now including the framework itself (complete with diagrams mapping out the different parts of the MVC whole).

The PHP::Impact blog has a new post that overviews the plugin system that the Symfony framework has to offer.

If you want to use the power of the Rails framework without having to learn Ruby, then Symfony is the right framework for you. After spending more than 10 months playing around with Rails, I can say that Symfony is a great alternative to Rails for programmers who already know PHP.

He talks about what a plugin is, how its used by the framework, the simple installation process and a "top ten" list of some of the most popular plugins (including sfGuardPlugin, sfSimpleForm and sfControlPanel).

This new post on the Symfony blog today looks at using the framework's built-in support for the YAML format. They include a few examples of the code to make the files and how to use them.

Here is a short tutorial about my discovery of the new YAML parsing library that comes with symfony 1.1. As you may know, YAML files are a place symfony developers spend time writing configuration, it is very important they have a good tool to manipulate data and debug files.

They include code showing how to pull in a sample file, access the properties inside of it and how to take a multi-dimensional PHP array and push it back out (automagically) into a new YAML formatted file.