First let me say this article is not a critic against CakePHP (except one point I will talk about later), Object Relational Mapping, far than a trivial thing, it’s a very complicated one.

Let’s begin explaining what this TLA (three-letter acronym) is 🙂 Object Relational Mapping is a programming technique for allowing objects interact with a relational database, trying to allow the programmer to create, insert, update and delete objects in the database without typing a single line of SQL. The technical difficulties are well know (by the name «Object-relational impedance mismatch») and there is a lot of theory about them. In fact, some frameworks like CodeIgniter or Zend Framework avoid not only ORM but the models. This is not because these frameworks don’t follow the MVC pattern but because they follow a different philosophy: as it’s impossible to know how the datasource will be, better to don’t provide models and let them for the developer. They just provide some classes to interact with databases. The fact CakePHP implements ORM helps us to rapid develop an application, CRUD interfaces creation can be automatized, etc. CakePHP is RAD!
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