Working with Doctrine 1.x, Zend Framework, and Flex

Later Update: If you are looking for an article rather on Doctrine 2 than Doctrine 1, then check this one.

This year I finally had the time to play with Doctrine (version 1.x) and Flex. Actually, it was more than playing; I’m using it for a real project that hopefully will enter production pretty soon. To summarize the experience in just a few words: it’s mind-blowing.

OK, I admit I may be exaggerating a little bit. Still, it is something that can change the way you build projects. Doctrine is an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) framework for PHP and it can really speed up the server side development when you have a lot of tables in your database.
In this article, I explore how to work with Doctrine on the server side, Flex on the client side, and remoting to communicate between Flex and PHP (using the Zend Framework for remoting on the PHP side). I also want to share with you some tools and workflows that can save you some time. While most things are fairly straightforward there are a number of tips and tricks that you may find useful if you decide to go down this road. (I will show you how to use plain vanilla value objects and how to handle dates just to give you two examples. Why reinvent the wheel?)

The application I’m going to build in this article is simple but the workflow is the same one I used with a much more complex application. Having said that let’s start by understanding the big picture.