NYCPHP Meetup

[Anirudh Zala]

On Friday 18 Jan 2008 09:23:47 Paul Houle wrote:
> Ajai Khattri wrote:
> > On Thu, 17 Jan 2008, paul at devonianfarm.com wrote:
> >> Symfony has a mature view system that has caching and other advanced
> >> features (I wish I could say it was as mature in the data access
> >> department)
> >
> > Care to elaborate?
> >
> > Also, have you played with Doctrine much?
>
>     The more I've thought about it,  the more I like the basic approach
> of Propel.  (In fact,  today I was working on a data access layer for an
> ASP.NET application and ended up building a "Peer" class because needed
> some place to stick the static methods associated with a particular
> database table.)
>
>     Symfony/Propel fails seriously,  however,  when it comes to database
> maintainability.
>
>     You're left high and dry if you do things the "symfony" way of
> writing your schema files and building a database from that.  Want to do
> something simple like add a column?  There's no way to do it other than
> to make a change in the schema and ~then~ make a change in the database.
>
>     Things get really hairy when you install a plugin or two...  I used
> sf_comment to add comments to this site:
>
> http://spoonriveranthology.net/spoon/river/
>
>     I followed the install instructions for sf_comment and found that
> the build scripts trashed my database.  Symfony plug-ins are based on
> the assumption that you design the database,  build the site out and
> never change it.
>
>     Now,  there is a way out,  and that's the strategy of having the
> 'official' copy of the database schema be in the database and build your
> propel schema from that.  I've had reasonable results that way,  but
> have run into two problems:
>
> (i) if you don't follow certain (unwritten) conventions in how your
> tables and columns are named,  Propel might build weird database
> bindings or might build database bindings that don't compile.  For
> instance,  I inherited a database that had a field named 'count'.  Maybe
> you're not supposed to do that (count is a mysql function) but the
> database worked just fine until Propel got involved.
> (ii) I'm not entirely happy with how foreign keys work,  at least with a
> mysql back end.  Foreign keys get imported in the schema,  almost
> correctly,  if you're running an innodb database,  but not if you're
> running myisam (which doesn't keep the metadata.)  It would be really
> nice to have a place to keep hints about foreign keys that get merged
> with fresh info from the database schema.
>
> --------
>
> Doctrine?  On paper doctrine looks great.  The migration mechanism looks
> promising and so does the query language.  In practice,  documentation
> is lacking.  For instance,
>
> http://trac.symfony-project.com/wiki/sfDoctrinePlugin1.1
>
> Doesn't say a word about how you configure your database connections or
> how you build your model from your schemas.  It would be really nice to
> have a sample app based on Doctrine that you can install by going down a
> checklist.  That's how Doctrine fails the maturity test.  Every symfony
> project I've done in the last few months has been something where I need
> to deliver some real functionality in a few hours...  I can either get
> the job done with Propel,  where I'm up on the learning curve,  or I
> could mess around for twice as long to get it working with Doctrine...
> Only to find that I did it my own way rather than a standardized
> framework way.

Good points.

When you move from medium to large scale projects, Symfony starts getting 
restricted. For example there is no native support to handle replication of 
database hence you left stumped that what to do.

Fortunately there is plugin to do so. But it has also it's limitations. It 
supports only 1 master and many slave type of replication. Hence if you need 
to handle multiple masters and slaves then you have no other way except 
modifying that plugin.

Thanks

Anirudh Zala

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