Doctrine DBAL

[MichaelC]

After our change of template engine to twig it makes sense to follow a similar pattern for our DBAL for similar reasons:

• It's more extensible
• It should improve performance (Doctrine does some awesome SQL query combining)
• It allows better interoperability
• We don't have to maintain it ourselves
• Known by developers outside of phpBB but also very easy to pick up by phpBB developers
• A wrapper can be employed so BC is not broken (similar to the request class)

This change would likely be a 3.2 change but BC would be kept with an old wrapper so it could go into 3.1 if it's done well enough and in time.

[EXreaction]

I believe these should be treated as two separate RFCs/issues.

Switching to the Doctrine DBAL is relatively simple, it just takes a good chunk of time and someone interested in doing it (I've tried it once already, with a couple hours of work you can be using Doctrine for 95% of phpBB, though cleanup and the remaining usage will be much more time).

Supporting the ORM is not much, if any work after that point, but using the ORM for phpBB code is a point that would need to be discussed separately at that time.

As far as switching to Doctrine; great if someone is willing to pick it up and take care of it. I for one see many other items with much worse and older code that should be moved to use other frameworks/libraries before the DBAL (e.g. message parser/bbcodes, messenger/email, file transfers) as, the way I see it, those chunks of code are very old, not maintainable, and lack many highly desired features, whereas the DBAL does pretty much everything we need it to do right now. If someone were willing to take this project up I would love to see it and happy to assist/review/merge it, but I think the development team has other priorities to focus on at this time.

[MichaelC]

I'm quite willing to pick up the DBAL (at some point in the next few months) at least as it makes interop between symfony and phpBB easier, same with decoupling sessions & auth a bit more which I'm doing at the moment.

I'd appreciate any work that has already been done.

[EXreaction]

The work I did was just to test it, I don't know if I have the code I was starting in a branch, but I don't think I'd want to use what I had anyways (I basically made Doctrine a new DBAL driver, then forwarded all the requests to Doctrine).

[CHItA]

Any new opinions on this for 3.3?

[Nicofuma]

+1 on the initial proposal: nuke our current DBAL, expose doctrine dbal through a new service and make the service dbal.conn a simple wrapper for the doctrine service (wrapper which will be nuked in 4.0)

[DavidIQ]

If it supports the same variety we currently support then sure, why not.

[Nicofuma]

doctrine dbal is currently supporting

Code: Select all

    MySQL
    Oracle
    Microsoft SQL Server
    PostgreSQL
    SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere
    SQLite
    Drizzle

[MichaelC]

+1 on the initial proposal: nuke our current DBAL, expose doctrine dbal through a new service and make the service dbal.conn a simple wrapper for the doctrine service (wrapper which will be nuked in 4.0)

+1 to this

https://tracker.phpbb.com/browse/PHPBB3-14463