Philip Brown has a new tutorial on getting started with Doctrine in Laravel. He talks a lot about the differences between Doctrine and Eloquent and why he likes one over the other.
It’s important to say, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Eloquent or the Active Record pattern. I’ve personally used Eloquent in a number of projects. Eloquent (and the Active Record pattern) make working with data and persistence in your application a total breeze.
However I do like the Data Mapper pattern and what it can offer you as a developer. I think using Doctrine 2 in a Laravel application is a good opportunity to write some tutorials on using the ORM and making good use of the different methodology. I’ve been looking at using it for a while, but Mitchell’s bridge package sealed the deal for me.
I’m looking forward to the rest of his series.
