Mandango is an easy, poweful and ultrafast Object Document Mapper (ODM) for PHP and MongoDB.
MongoDB (Mongo) is a scalable, high-performance, open source, document-oriented database.
Mongo (and the NOSQL movement in general) answer to the needs for performance of databases, that each time more applications (especially web) have, due to the high number of reads, writes and the high amount of information to store.
Note
If you want to know more about MongoDB, you can visit its web: http://www.mongodb.org
An ODM is a tool that maps the structure of the databases in objects (PHP in this case). This way you can work in your documents from the database with PHP objects, with all the great advantages that it carries.
An ODM also abstracts usual operations with the documents, and provides with utilities that can simplify a lot common tasks.
An ODM also has a disadvantage: the performance. This is due to using objects and abstracting operations.
Apparently the Mongo philosophy doesn’t agree with the philosophy of ODM, because on one hand Mongo speeds the database and on the other hand the ODM slow down the applications. It’s true, but we don’t have to forget of the rapid application development.
The Rapid Application Development RAD is very important in order that your applications are running as soon as it is possible, because it isn’t worthwhile to spend a lot of time finishing a superfast application if when it is going to be in production it can’t compete or it’s unmaintainable.
Mandango is to the ODMs what Mongo is to databases.
¿Aren’t you convinced yet? Let me show you a few more features:
Note
Mandango is the fastest mapper in PHP by far. More information in the performance comparison.
Mandango requires PHP 5.3.0 or greater, and of course MongoDB and the PHP driver for MongoDB (1.0.11 or greater).
Mandango uses object oriented PHP and Mongo, so if you want to start using it you should know both things minimally at least.
You can install Mandango downloading it directly, by git, svn.
More information in the Mandango installation page.