In a new post to his blog Jigal Sanders shares some of his experience in working with Doctrine 2.1 in a Zend Framework-based (1.11.9) application for his database interface needs.

I hadn't been using Doctrine for a while and decided to pick it up two weeks ago, as we wanted to see if we can implement it for our CMS at our office. So I setup a clean installation of the zend framework (1.11.9) and tried tried to implement Doctrine. The main goal was to see if we can reverse engineer existing databases and then start doing some queries.

There were three things he found in the process that caused a few issues:

• A confusing set of terms and features that weren't explained well enough to know their use
• Getting things like autoloaders working with the Zend Framework to make things work well together
• A potential bug with the "name" property on an object and some automatic namespacing Doctrine tries to do

There are already a lot of resources available on the Internet. I have looked at various configurations, like for example the 'bisna' project from Guilhere Blanco. But I keep saying that it's really difficult and has a steep learning curve. Doctrine 1.2 was really simple. Doctrine 2.x is a lot more difficult to get into.