The goal is to automate basic query construction, decouple the application from the database, and allow for faster development. With Junction you write a simple data object (the only requirement is that it have getters and setters) and a mapping file, following that you can start interacting with the database.

The project is completely open source (under the MIT license) and is operating under the "release early, release often" mentality. You can grab this most recent download directly from their site.

Object persistence layer provides the developers with the API that allows them to operate with data of the application in object-oriented manner. The developers can use known OOP methods for searching for and restoring the objects from the database. Something like this you can find on the main page of the Propel project and in the Wikipedia article about ORM technology.

These enthusiastic words roused my interest in the technology and I promised myself I would spend some time on testing a software for generating object persistence classes. And I ready to try the Propel library, because it is used by the Symphony framework, which I plan to test in a couple of weeks.

He starts with a little background information about why he's chosen to go with Propel and the process he followed to get things up and running smoothly. He links to the software you'll need (Propel, Creole, and Phing) and gives the install structure and environment variables you'll need to set. Finally, he gives an example .bat file to help perform the install automatically, reducing the problems that could happen when done manually.

Firing up the CouchDb server on Windows is a breeze-follow the README. PHP-wise, you need the new http extension which is most easily done on Win32 by grabbing the most recent PHP 5 release (5.1.6) and the corresponding collection of PECL modules.

The interface between CouchDb and PHP is REST - XML + HTTP - you can also point your browser directly at the CouchDb server (default - localhost:8080) and get around with a little help from the CouchDb wiki.

So, if it's Just Another Database, why should we pay attention? Harry notes (with a code example) that it's more about how it stores the information and not just that it does. His example takes in a POST request from a form and pushes it (raw data) into the CouchDb functions. He also gives an example of where this would be handy - in a wiki (like Dokuwiki) where the files are currently stored on the filesystem instead of in a database.