Exactly one year ago today we released Doctrine 1.0 stable, which was on the birthday of Jon. Again, today we have chosen the birthday of Jon to release the first preview of Doctrine 2. This is an alpha release that is not intended for production use.

Doctrine 2 marks the beginning of a new approach to ORM with Doctrine. It represents a rewrite of more than 90% of the existing codebase. The new key concepts behind Doctrine 2 are to put your domain model more into focus and to provide transparent persistence where the persistence is a service and not an inherent property of domain classes. This has a lot of advantages like decoupling your valuable business logic from the persistence layer and easy testability of your domain model.

Packages

Doctrine 2 is reorganized into reusable layers that are available as separate packages. The Doctrine 2 Core consists of the following packages:

• Doctrine Common (Generic components, high re usability)
• Doctrine DBAL (The database abstraction layer, includes: Common)
• Doctrine ORM (The ORM tools, includes: Common + DBAL)

All of these packages are currently distributed and maintained synchronously which means they are released together and share the same version numbers. This may change in the future. These three packages are available as separate downloads even though you will most likely want to download the ORM package which already contains the Common and DBAL packages.

Features

This Preview Release is mainly about the core ORM functionality and features of Doctrine 2, like mapping drivers, DQL, association mapping, inheritance mapping, change tracking, etc. Most of the supporting tools that you are used to for rapid development like the CLI, migrations, behaviors and validation have not yet been ported to Doctrine 2 and are still under heavy development, most of them will end up as loosely coupled extensions.

Mapping drivers

A mapping driver is a particular strategy for providing ORM metadata to Doctrine 2. This Preview Release contains mapping drivers for docblock annotations, XML and YAML. The XML and YAML drivers are still in an experimental stage and while we encourage you to use them, you may encounter more issues than with the docblock annotation driver as it is the primary driver used in our development.

Documentation

The documentation for Doctrine 2 can be found here. Please be aware that the documentation is still a work in progress and not all areas have been completed.

Sandbox

To get started quickly, please check out our sandbox quickstart tutorial. You can also obtain Doctrine 2.0.0 ALPHA1 via a PEAR package like normal which can be found on the download

We want to encourage everyone to start experimenting with the new generation of Doctrine in order to get familiar with it and to help find any outstanding issues.

As always, please report any issues and feature requests through trac.

Thank you for using Doctrine.