NYCPHP Meetup

[Rob Marscher]

I think ORM definitely fits a lot of common models.  It can be great  
for rapid development which is why frameworks like Ruby on Rails and  
CakePHP have it build in.  You just define the fields and the  
relationships to other objects and the built in methods for saving  
the objects (which will maintain your foreign keys), retrieving an  
object (and their related objects), and get listings of objects work  
without any additional coding.

There are other cases where you might need tables that don't fit to  
an OOP model -- or you need custom sql to get the best optimized  
listings.  Even if you use ORM, you still need to understand the SQL  
layer underneath to really optimize your application.

I haven't used the open source php ORM solutions (Propel, CakePHP,  
etc) -- but I hear there are ways to configure/tune them to get  
better optimized sql under-the-covers.  That would be a presentation  
I'd like to see.  Anyone have experience with this?

-Rob