On: SQLAlchemy vs Other ORMs

[wldlyinaccurate]

I've used Doctrine 2 with PHP, and am yet to find another ORM like it in any language. It stands out as unique (to me) in that you just write plain old classes which don't need to know about the ORM. You write a separate schema which Doctrine reads and then uses proxy objects for the mapping.

Am I the only person that finds this preferable to coupling your objects with the ORM?

[rch → wldlyinaccurate]

It's been a while, but I enjoyed using Castor before other approaches became so widely adopted in the Java world. Does it seem conceptually similar at least?

http://castor.codehaus.org

[wldlyinaccurate → rch]

From the very little I read of the documentation, it seems like a similar concept -- mapping the objects to the data is done outside of the objects.

[fleetfox → wldlyinaccurate]

Actually Doctrine is Hibernate implemented in php http://hibernate.org/orm/

[wldlyinaccurate → fleetfox]

Interesting, thanks. I had heard of Hibernate before but never actually looked into it. I can definitely see the similarities - especially between Doctrine's DQL and Hibernate's HQL.

[eevee → wldlyinaccurate]

SQLAlchemy also does this. Which is appropriate, since "ORM" implies that on some level you're mapping existing relations to existing objects.