Some recent discussions and debates about Active Record and Data Mapper have popped up in the context of new architectural proposals for CiviCRM from Dharmatech and raSANTIAGO. We think it is important that the differences between each is known and to clarify what are some erroneous perceptions. This is not to claim that either design pattern is above criticism. It is to say, that there are some misperceptions that prevent a more intelligent discussion of the trade-offs between these two design patterns. Our hope is to bring some clarity to this discussion.

This is a follow up to our last post proposing a new architecture for CiviCRM. Much appreciation for everyone's patience. Following from our last post we want to go over the use of Doctrine, a PHP implementation of the Active Record design pattern made popular through Ruby on Rails. The Doctrine Project has done a great job of maintaining detailed documentation and has a lot of features that we believe everyone will find useful when working with CiviCRM objects. We have posted some of our working code for the new ORM and REST API here at git hub.We have given this code set the working name civiBASE.

Here at raSANTIAGO we are entering our third year with CiviCRM and still find ourselves struggling to make desired changes to the codebase. Too often we have expressed desired to re-architect and re-factor the CiviCRM. Recently we have completed two major projects that had us deeper in the codebase then before and realizing that we had to stop complaining.