There's definitely a need for a 'great' PHP ORM. I've been rolling my own for a couple of years since I've never been satisfied with what's out there. Here's the kind of syntax/style I use on mine (that class definition is the entire code I need to write to get working abstraction).

class Person extends Model {

const TABLE_NAME = 'people';

const TABLE_KEY = 'id';

}

$person = Model::find("Person", 1234);

$person->name = "James";

$person->save();

$persons_named_james = Model::find("Person", array("name" => "James"));

foreach($persons_named_james as $person) {

print $person->age;

}

$person = new Person();

$person->age = 26;

$person->save();

I should really upgrade to 5.3 so I could write Person::find(1234); instead.