maxgarrick.com » doctrine orm http://maxgarrick.com Come take a look under the hood Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:32:09 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 en hourly 1 Delivered: MessageBoard! http://maxgarrick.com/delivered-messageboard/ http://maxgarrick.com/delivered-messageboard/#comments Sun, 14 Dec 2008 16:41:43 +0000 max http://maxgarrick.com/?p=109 MessageBoard, a PHP & MySQL web application with a Doctrine ORM back-end, was launched last Friday, right on deadline. This concludes 7 month-long phases of development.

I think the ingredients essential to delivering this application on-time and within budget were:

  • Partnering with a user experience expert who designed the mock ups and wrote the bulk of HTML, CSS, and Javascript
  • Doctrine ORM: previously we hand-crafted SQL which was error-prone and occasionally introduced security vulnerabilities.
  • Month-long development iterations with a tested, working product delivered at the end of every month.

Looking forward, there is an increasing need at our campus for an Academic Personnel Review web application, which will transform a paper process into a fully online process. The major motivation behind this project is to reduce the massive amount of staff time that goes into coordinating this process in each campus unit.

This application will very likely be built in Java!

]]> http://maxgarrick.com/delivered-messageboard/feed/ 0 Doctrine 1.0.4 Fixes SoftDelete http://maxgarrick.com/doctrine-104-fixes-softdelete/ http://maxgarrick.com/doctrine-104-fixes-softdelete/#comments Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:02:21 +0000 max http://maxgarrick.com/?p=104 Just wanted to post an update to my previous blog entry about Doctrine ORM gotchas. Since 1.0.4 was released, a seriously limiting bug was fixed in the SoftDelete template. This bug was preventing typical performance optimizations that used LEFT JOINs to reduce the number of database queries. The idea is that a page generally loads much faster by executing few efficient JOIN’ed queries than many single-table queries (do your joins in MySQL, not PHP!)

I had posted a workaround to this bug ($query->addWhere(”deleted = 0 OR deleted IS NULL”) to all of your LEFT JOINs). This was cumbersome and I felt violated the principle of the SoftDelete event listener.

With this bug resolved, I’ve been more freely adding custom finders for specific pages. One page in particular (the MessageBoard thread index) went from 12 seconds to 4 seconds for a very large data set. The number of DB queries also was cut from 1200+ to about 300.

Now I just have to get the page down to 10 queries and we can call it optimized.

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