The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted today that talks about the integration of one of the more popular database abstraction/relational mapping tools for PHP5 with the Zend Framework. Specifically, it picks up where this article left off.

One area that the article did not mention was, how does the app know which model will be used? I mean, let's say a client clicks on the link "controller/action", do I have to wait for the front controller to dispatch the request to the controller before knowing that it was called? That is, the model is known explicitly by my app only when I'm in the requested action.

He notes a pretty simple solution to the problem - using the Zend Framework plugin system to create an interface between the application and the model classes that Propel generates.