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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] On how a little knowledge is completely useless.
From: ralph@smashlabs.com (Ralph Schindler)

Inline response:

On 9/17/10 1:57 PM, Jonathan Bond-Caron wrote:
> On Fri Sep 17 01:06 PM, Guilherme Blanco wrote:
>>
>> Another good example is to map your persistence data into your
>> Entities. Doctrine 2 implements this and I think that way you can
>> compare easily with the PHP code alternative. I'd like to ask you to
>> compate the same Entity mapped through Annotations emulator and using
>> raw PHP code:
>> CmsUser using Annotations:
>> http://github.com/doctrine/doctrine2/blob/master/tests/Doctrine/Tests/
>> M
>> odels/CMS/CmsUser.php
>> CmsUser using PHP code:
>> http://github.com/doctrine/doctrine2/blob/master/tests/Doctrine/Tests/
>> O RM/Mapping/php/Doctrine.Tests.ORM.Mapping.User.php
>>
>
> You're basically bundling (M: Model, data&  configuration, C: Control, business logic / code) into a single class while the MVC pattern is all about separating M,V and C.

Jonathan, I think you are misinterpreting this code.  There is no 
Controller (Front controller, or parameter mapping from $_POST or $_GET) 
nor View responsibilities (echo) here.  These are all Model concerns: 
how is data persisted, how is it mapped to the persistence layer, how 
are entities created and how are their dependencies injected, etc.

By using doctrine, you are adopting & subscribing to Doctrines 
philosophy of how tool based modeling should work.  The code doesnt run 
without doctrine in the mix anyway (you'd have their entity manager in 
play at all times).  How they (the Doctrine project) decide to manage 
mappings is up to them, and you'd be free to either consume their ORM 
framework, or not.  It is both a development time and production time tool.

> What's wrong with a simple configuration file? Caching the parsed config in shared memory?

There is nothing wrong with that, but that is only a single approach. 
Alot of times, developers want a close relationship between the metadata 
and the code it is about.  That means not in separate files, but inside 
the same file.  This is why projects like *Hibernate are so popular in 
enterprise software.  No one wants to develop an ORM, they just want a 
way to persist their objects.. and a little penalty in performance is a 
sound trade-off.

> One important flaw rarely mentioned with annotations config: your code now depends on framework X to read the annotations instead of a simple configuration file (.xml, .ini., ...)

Doctrine, Symphony DI, even ZF.. and include to that the non PHP 
solutions.. none of these are frameworks you can adpot in less than 5 
minutes.  It takes some investment of time to understand their 
philosophy and also decide how it best fits into your personal code toolkit.

That means that you'd have understood how said framework plans and does 
use these annotations.

> Sorry if I might sound harsh but configuration through annotations is terrible.
> You'll find many .net or java developers that agree, I'd say it's 50-50 if not more 70-30.
>
> Does this discussion still belong in internals? We could argue about this for months, java astronauts don't even agree how annotations are useful:
> http://www.javaworld.com/community/node/2613

Arguments like this will always exist.  But that's less the point. The 
point is is that there are many developers that exists that have taken 
the time to adopt a persistence framework like *Hibernate, and no one 
can argue that they do not get their job done, and annotations have 
certainly helped them get there and create maintainable code.

-ralph