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.

In this first post I will provide a link and some commentary on Rasmus's points regarding Doctrine (note I left independent chatter in the log in order to not have any chance of me filtering the content, but there is very little of that so I hope the discussion is still easy enough to follow).