I have developed a number of LAMP based applications over several years using mysql. I am now trying to be more efficient in code creation so I am testing Doctrine 2 with Zend Framework 2.2.
I was delighted to find ORM Designer 2 and was quickly able to create a couple of simple tables to begin testing. I then exported to YML and as annotations and also had some minor success in getting doctrine to generate the tables and the entities.
Next I pulled a couple of samples from GitHub to integrate Doctrine2 with ZF2 and generated a set of CRUD dialogs to allow me to list a table, create entries, edit and delete entries.
So far I felt that I was getting somewhere. However I then felt that ease of development promised early on was starting to fade. Remember that I have no previous experience in ORM designer, doctrine or ZF2.
I did find a few bugs with ORM Designer2 but that did not stop me. It was rather that I did not meet my expectations - here is what I thought I could achieve:
Starter kit:
1) Create schema in ORM Designer 2 ( including several tables and relation types )
2) Export to a format that Doctrine can turn into schema
3) Link doctrine tables to a ZF application to generate basic CRUD dialogs to allow data entry / editing for all the tables whilst respecting the relations.
What I ended up with:
1) ORM Designer - schema created as intended
2) Doctrine 2 - created the schema and the php entities with annotations
3) ZF2 Nothing automatic here - after several attempts I managed to create a CRUD application to edit an unlinked table.
Can you recommend any php based solution that can really take the modules created in ORM Designer2 to make a functional prototype? I quite happy to write code for creating interesting reports, but I would really like to find a solution that can accelerate all the table maintenance chores - my next application has over 60 tables in the schema.
Perhaps the best new feature would be to provide working code that provides in a prototype application.
( If that were possible I think that ZF Form annotations would be a great compliment to the Doctrine annotations).
regards
Steve