Good PHP ORM Library?

Look into Doctrine.

Doctrine 1.2 implements Active Record. Doctrine 2+ is a DataMapper ORM.

Also, check out Xyster. It's based on the Data Mapper pattern.

Also, take a look at DataMapper vs. Active Record.

Try RedBean, its requires:

• No configuration
• No database (it creates everything on the fly)
• No models
• etc.

It even does all the locking and transactions for you and monitors performance in the background. (Heck! it even does garbage collection....) Best of all... you don't have to write a single... line of code... Jesus this, ORM layer, saved me ass!

There are only two good ones: Doctrine and Propel. We favor Doctrine, and it works well with Symfony. However if you're looking for database support besides the main ones you'll have to write your own code.

I've been developing Pork.dbObject on my own. (A simple PHP ORM and Active Record implementation) The main reason is that I find most ORMs too heavy.

The main thought of Pork.dbObejct is to be light-weight and simple to set up. No bunch of XML files, just one function call in the constructor to bind it, and an addRelation or addCustomRelation to define a relation to another dbObject.

Give it a look: Pork.dbObject

I just started with Kohana, and it seems the closest to Ruby on Rails without invoking all the complexity of multiple configuration files like with Propel.

I really like Propel, here you can get an overview, the documentation is pretty good, and you can get it through PEAR or SVN.

You only need a working PHP5 install, and Phing to start generating classes.

Check out Outlet ORM. It is simpler than Propel and Doctrine and it works similar to Hibernate, only with more of a PHP feel to it.

Give a shot to dORM, an object relational mapper for PHP 5. It supports all kinds of relationships (1-to-1), (1-to-many), (many-to-many) and data types. It is completely unobtrusive: no code generation or class extending required. In my opinion it is superior to any ORM out there, Doctrine and Propel included. However, it is still in beta and might change significantly in the next couple months. http://www.getdorm.com

It also has a very small learning curve. The three main methods you will use are:

<?php 
$object = $dorm->getClassName('id_here');
$dorm->save($object);
$dorm->delete($object);

I am currently working on phpDataMapper, which is an ORM designed to have simple syntax like Ruby's Datamapper project. It's still in early development as well, but it works great.

Until PHP 5.3 release don't expect to have a good ORM. It's a OO limitation of PHP.

My friend Kien and I have improved upon an earlier version of an ORM that he had written prior to PHP 5.3. We have essentially ported over Ruby on Rails' Active Record to PHP. It is still lacking some key features we want such as transactions, composite primary key support, a few more adapters (only MySQL and SQLite 3 work right now). But, we are very close to finishing this stuff up. You can take a look at PHP ActiveRecord with PHP 5.3.

Try PHP ADOdb.

I can't say it's the best, because I haven't used the others. But it's fast, it supports Memcached and caching.

And it's waaaay faster than Zend Framework's DB/Select.

You can check out Repose if you are feeling adventurous. Like Outlet, it is modeled after Hibernate.

It is still very early in its development, but so far the only restrictions on the domain model are that the classes are not marked final and properties are not marked private. Once I get into the land of PHP >= 5.3, I'll try to implement support for private properties as well.

Doctrine is probably your best bet. Prior to Doctrine, DB_DataObject was essentially the only other utility that was open sourced.

If you are looking for an ORM, like Hibernate, you should have look at PMO.

It can be easily integrated in an SOA architecture (there is only a webservice classe to develop).

There's a fantastic ORM included in the QCubed framework; it's based on code generation and scaffolding. Unlike the ActiveRecord that's based on reflection and is generally slow, code generation makes skeleton classes for you based on the database and lets you customize them afterward. It works like a charm.

A really good simple ORM is MyActiveRecord. MyActiveRecord documentation. I have been using it a lot and can say it's very simple and well tested.

Looked at Syrius ORM. It's a new ORM, the project was in a development stage, but in the next mouth it will be released in a 1.0 version.