I have been using Zend Framework 1.x at work for some time now. I appreciate the large number of components, many of which my system uses on a daily basis. Yes, it is a large library, but we have a very large application that probably does too many things.
ZF2 is coming out soon and it seems quite different from 1.x. I downloaded the betas and skeleton app, and looked at the well written tutorials, but I am still having a difficult time wrapping my mind around it. So I have decided to see if the grass is greener elsewhere. There are plenty of PHP frameworks out there to choose from, but I have one particular requirement: Oracle support. I work in a somewhat regulated space and the big vendors are preferred over the Open Source databases. And not just any Oracle support, we need to use the oci8 driver.
Most of the new frameworks prefer to use PDO for their database abstraction layer. This is fine for most people who are using MySQL or PostgreSQL. This is not great for us Oracle users. Although there is a pdo_oci extension, it is very buggy. We have to use the oci8 driver instead. And no, I cannot just switch to MySQL.
So, which of the frameworks support oci8? *feel free to correct me in your comments
| Framework | DBAL | oci8 | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| ZF 1.x | Internal | Y | |
| CodeIgniter 2 | – | Y | |
| Symfony2 | Doctrine | Y | According to the Doctrine 2.0x docs oci8 is supported. |
| ZF2 | Internal/Doctrine | Y | |
| CakePHP 2.x | – | + | http://www.hassanbakar.com/2012/01/09/using-oracle-in-cakephp-2-0/ |
| Lithium | Internal | N | MySQL, SQLite3, CouchDB, MongoDB |
| Aura | Wrappers around PDO | N | MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite3, SQLServer |
| DooPHP | Wrappers around PDO | N | |
| Yii | Internal | ? | Found a note from 2009 saying it worked |
| FuelPHP | Internal | ? | |
| Slim | – | No DB support in framework |
When I was researching frameworks 3 years ago I looked at Doctrine as a DBAL and even contributed a few patches to the project, but eventually got frustrated enough to bail on it and go with ZF’s vanilla approach. Should I try out Doctrine again or use something like Slim and keeping all my existing ZF1 database code?