ActiveRecord is fine. It is a tool that does just what it's designed to do. What sucks is when developers try to make it do other things than what it's intended to do.

He cites his work with the Zend_Db component and how Mike Seth gets it right when he says that the pattern shouldn't be "ActiveRecord-View-Controller". He compares the ideas of a true Model in an MVC application with the incorrect ideas that many developers seem to hold.

A Model is a class that provides a logical component of your application domain. Models are products of OO design, which is a development activity I see get very little attention in the developer blogosphere or the developer tools market.

Models can reference one or many (or no) database tables and are not where the hard work is being done. That's saved for the ORM (or ActiveRecord) to do.

Using the view as a starting point may seem odd at first considering the view-related actions are some of the last steps in the page load scenario, but since our views don't have any external dependencies, unit tests are very easy to write and so is the accompanying code.

He explains how views work along with the rest of the framework and some of the basic rules surrounding how they get their data. Code comes along with the explanations for different views like XML, HTML and JSON methods of output.

After speaking with any number of users about getting started with a framework, I find many do not have an advanced understanding of the corner stone of a current day web application framework: the Model-View-Controller Design Pattern.

He explains the normal development approach (kind of a Page Controller where each bit of functionality has its own page) versus the Model/View/Controller approach of separation of presentation and logic in a structured fashion. He also goes through each of the parts of the MVC equation and shows the difference between the roles that the Controller and Model have in the application.

In my previous article, I announced that I would be documenting the process of developing a simple MVC framework. In this post I will go into a little more detail about each of the specific components of our MVC and will discuss the series of events which occur each time a page loads, otherwise known as the page load scenario.

He talks about how URIs work, the role of mod_rewrite, several of the objects involved (like the Front Controller, Request, Route and View) and how they all fit in with the custom Models, Views and Controllers the user could define.