Deprecate AnnotationRegistry in favor of class_exists()

[kingcrunch]

Replacement for #29. See over there for discussion

I've removed the fork and therefore the PR got unlinked and unmanageable somehow. The previous PR had merge conflicts, but I wanted to keep it, so I've re-created it.

See also: doctrine/common#321

Actually it looks like there is no benefit in using a separate autoloading mechanism, which itself only
makes (manual) use of "real" autoloaders. Instead class_exists() serves the same purpose and
prevents one from the need to manually add an autoloader for every loader, that should load
annotations.

This is especially interesting now, that composer took over most of the autoloading related issues in
many projects.

I don't know, which deprecation-rules apply here, so I just added the tag and kept the class as it is, but
remove the use wherever useful.

[DavidBadura]

a big +1 for this! in each lib from me i have to add

\Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationRegistry::registerLoader('class_exists');

or i need to document it.

[Ocramius]

I think this can be applied once http://www.doctrine-project.org/jira/browse/DCOM-295 is done.

[Ocramius]

Personally fully agree with the patch.

As per discussions with internals, the autoloader was mainly meant for:

• fixing problems with non-silent autoloaders (autoloaders that cry loud when trying to load non existing classes)
• ignoring some classes (specifically)

I don't think non-silent autoloaders are a thing anymore, since @stof pretty much helped in killing them gradually.

As for the "ignoring" functionality, if DCOM-295 lands, then there is no need for such features, as the imports decide what annotations should be loaded or not.

Still needs some discussion with the others at @doctrine/team-doctrine2

[stof]

I don't think non-silent autoloaders are a thing anymore, since @stof pretty much helped in killing them gradually.

Most of the work has been done by the composer adoption here actually: the composer autoloader is silent when it cannot find the class, and most projects are now using it.

[Ocramius]

Yup, but also other autoloaders (including ours) were simply "fixed"

[Jalle19]

Just wanted to say that this doesn't work if you use this in a ZF1 project because its autoloader doesn't fail silently. I've resolved this by using this instead:

AnnotationRegistry::registerLoader(function($fqcn) {
    return @class_exists($fqcn);
});

[stof]

@Jalle19 an autoloader breaking class_exists should die IMO. I suggest you to ask the ZF team if they could fix the ZF1 autoloader (as it seems ZF1 is still a thing)

[Ocramius]

Fully agree: the ZF1 class loader should be fixed instead. Note that you may also just use the composer class loader also for ZF1 projects.

[Jalle19]

I don't really care, I wouldn't touch ZF1 unless I had to (working on a legacy application). Any solution that means people don't have to register a loader manually anymore is good in my book.

[Ocramius]

@Jalle19 for new projects, you wouldn't pick something like ZF1 anyway. This is why we're discussing about deprecation and removal in next major versions.

[hboomsma]

👍

[Majkl578]

@kingcrunch Hi, I reapplied your changes onto current master as part of #205, let's make this happen. 😎
Meanwhile closing here, let's handle it in the referenced PR.