Since this is a complete refactory, I, as well as the rest of the community, had to make a tough decision: which DBAL to use. First, I was OK with going to something ultra-lightweight, not even providing total abstraction (like PDO) but was rapidly convinced that it was not a good idea by Helgi. I decided to RFC on the Jaws developper list and here is the discussion that followed. Click here to see it in the archive.

What came out of it is that Doctrine might be a better choice since we could take advantage of its ORM features in the future. The downside to this is that we'll have to make our own schema routines (I have some ideas for this - more later) to replace MDB2_Schema.

I also discovered that Doctrine is in a very... early stage of developement, which means the documentation is sometimes incomplete, sometimes approximative. Also, since there is no stable release, I had to directly checkout from their SVN repository, which means I'll have to follow the developement of yet another application !

It seems to be worth the price right now, as it is extremely well built and it has rich features which will be helpful in the future development of Jaws.