In this new post to his blog Rob Allen looks at models in a Zend Framework application, specifically what thy're for and what they can do.

Let's talk about writing models that communicate with databases within a Zend Framework application. It's a popular topic at the moment as there's been a few threads recently on the ZF mailing lists about creating models.

He looks at the two different types of relationships they have to offer - "is a" and "has a" - with some code examples illustrating each. For the "has a" relationship (since its a bit more complex) he creates a gateway class that acts as an interface to the user information allowing for method calls to things like fetchAllInLastNameOrder, setFromArray and fetchUserById.