Preface

Doctrine 2 has become the most popular modern persistence system for PHP. It is distributed with the standard edition of the Symfony2 framework, can be used standalone in any PHP project and integrates very well with Zend Framework 2, CodeIgniter, or Laravel. It is efficient, automatically abstracts popular database managing systems, supports PHP 5.3 features (including namespaces), is installable through Composer, and has an extensively tested quality code base.

Doctrine's ORM library allows easy persisting and retrieving of PHP object graph, without writing any SQL query by hand. It also provides a powerful object-oriented SQL-like query language called DQL, a database schema generator tool, an event system, and much more.

To discover this must-have library, we will together build a typical small, blog engine.