A few of us have started exploring how we can integrate Doctrine into future versions of CiviCRM. A large part of this work was initiated by Peter Haight from Giant Rabbit who explained his thinking and approach in this blog post on Persistence Refactoring. One of our goals for the next few releases of CiviCRM is to improve the technology backbone that Civi is based on. It made sense to most of us to start from the database layer and then move outwards and using doctrine and working with peter seemed a good logical next step.
We decided to spend 3 weeks (till mid january) on various exploratory sprints and try and answer a few questions and see how things are done in the doctrine/symfony world of things. We also decided to start adopting more scrum - like technques and iterate on a weekly basis. Our goal is to come up with a list of things that we are curious about going forward and work on some potential answers during the week. So without further ado, here are some of the things that we decided to investigate and research this week:
- Analyze our form / page php code and the api layer and get a feel for the structure of the code base, how much replication, how many simple forms, how tightly coupled is the api and BAO.
- Get a better idea on the power and complexity of Doctrine annotations. Can we use them to store field meta data similar to what we have in the current xml files. What can we learn and borrow from Drupal 8 in this regard.
- Generate the doctrine entities file automatically from the xml files. This allows us to tranisition a lot of the information currently present in the xml files. In a nicely timed move, Adam Wight started on this work independently a few weeks back.
- Can we use some tools based on top of doctrine / symfony to make CRUD operations easier? We explored Sonata Admin to see if we could make writing simple CRUD forms, pages and listings trivial. Considering the number of tables in CiviCRM, making this easy to do is very important.
- How hard would it be to convert our code base to Doctrine from our current DAO layer?
- Get a doctrine branch on github to coordinate all current work.
You can visit our current issue board for this weeks sprint on our JIRA Agile dashboard. We still have a lot more questions and queries that we'll investigate over the next few weeks before we decide on our plans for integrating doctrine et al into CiviCRM.
If you are interested in joining these exporations and helping us find a few answers ping us on IRC. We'll blog on a regular basis and keep folks updated on our progress and current thinking.
