Dr. StrangeFramework or how I learned to stop worrying and love the layers

Part 5 – ORM
What is it? I don’t think there’s any definitive answer, but basically ORM (Object Relational Mapping) abstracts data into objects (or attempts to) – so multiple tables providing data to represent a single project is treated as a single object with in the code: project name, project tasks, project notes, etc. each stored separately in the database (RDBMS) becomes a set of related objects within the PHP code…what my hope was, was that DataMapper would provide the interface to define the data layer and then kick back a hierarchical single object (Project) that would provide methods to access the underlying related data (project notes, etc.)…well, it did make accessing and manipulating the data easier – the top-down object hope was not there (could be my misunderstanding of ORM OR the difficulty in providing it). Once again following a framework forced me to setup the various data tables in a standard format and it did handle all of the underlying SQL/DB requirements and probably reduced my code by half (at least). Without having a LARGE database, its difficult for me to say what the performance impact is…I would assume there’s some impact…but I’ll leave that to others to provide the insight on…next, wrapping up