Konsta recently formulated quite ambitious goals for the rest of the Google Summer of Code project. The goal is to have an 1.0.0 RC1 by August 31st. This would of course mark a significant milestone in the development of Doctrine, as this would finally give people the promise of a stable API to work with. Until then a number of things need to be done.

First up in my book is the unbundling of the current monolithic svn "packaging" into more finely grained PEAR installable packages. How finely grained is not yet decided, but at the very least we will see a split by DBAL and ORM. I also expect that some of the ORM extensions will also be unbundled like the search, auditing, tree or locking solutions.

I am particularly looking forward to an unbundled DBAL, hopefully resynced with as many of the improvements to MDB2 done by Lorenzo as possible, since it would bring the MDB2 features to an E_STRICT pdo based solution. Aside from this there is obviously a lot of other work left to do. Aligning the various API, fixing bugs and getting the documentation and tests much more complete.

Speaking of ORM's: One of the attractive features of having your SQL generated is that you get the ability to stuff like auditing, switching between inheritance or tree algos etc. quite elegantly. This is the reason why I am beginning to become a believer in ORM's.

Another thing, which should also become possible with MDB2 if the necessary callbacks are added, but which I see as a natural feature for ORM's, which know much more about the semantics of the application than just a DBAL, is the ability to automatically direct certain queries against other servers. For example the ability to direct write queries at a master and read queries against the local slave. I should find way more reasons to mention Matthias name in my blog, but he recently provided such a solution as a plugin for symfony using the Propel ORM and I am hopeful he will also write a plugin for Doctrine to leverage the internal event system for similar functionality.

Packages would be great, even simple zip files. I can't use svn over http at work, so I cant use doctrine there...

Yes, packages would be great. We waiting for that.

php devblog

Ooops.. I'm afraid I must look at your blog more often... ;-)

I developed this little loadbalancer plugin because one of my customers uses an Askeet based project where db load is increasing very fast. There is now a first (alpha) release available on the symfony site.

I think Konsta added enough event hooks now to make it possible to create such a plugin for Doctrine as well. But I wonder why to work on such a plugin while there are things like MYSQL_Proxy!?

Speaking about blogging, I was a bit lazy in the past (yeah.. I still have no blog..) but I will start my own one soon on medoly.com - which actually will be the home of our little "open source business plugins library" based on symfony 1.1 (or whatever they call it) and Doctrine starting with the new version of the sfPageControllerPlugin, a resource manager and a theme plugin I'm currently working on which allows to create websites like desktop applications using objects (widgets). The goal is to build a "web 2.0 dev backend" for symfony where you create your forms or even the complete view layer of your application in a cool drag 'n' drop editor. ;-)