I’ve worked on a small project that makes Rails-like AciveRecord available for PHP 5.3. It’s unimaginatively enough called active-record-php. I think an approach of this nature would make a really viable competitor to the likes of Propel and Doctrine and I’ll tell you why!

It works exactly like Rails’ ActiveRecord. There are two features in PHP 5 which makes this possible (the magic function __call – equivalent to method_missing in Ruby) and something called late-static binding which is only available in PHP 5.3. __call allows dynamic method invocation and late-static binding (along with a few tricks) simulates class and instance methods in Ruby. Let’s see some code!

user.php:
<?php

require_once 'base.php';

class User extends ActiveRecord::Base {
  protected static $class = __CLASS__;

  public static $associations = array(
    'has_many' => array(
      'photos'
    )
  );
};

?>

photo.php:
<?php

require_once 'base.php';

class Photo extends ActiveRecord::Base {
  protected static $class = __CLASS__;


};
?>

That’s a basic has_many relationship. Include the base.php class (which lives in its own namespace), and that’s it. No more configuring schema.xml, regenerating boilerplate get/setter code, etc. It’s all in there.

How do you use it? Again, intuitive:

<?php

require_once 'user.php';
require_once 'photo.php';

ActiveRecord::Base::establish_connection(array(
  'host' => 'localhost',
  'database' => 'test',
  'username' => 'root',
  'password' => 'root'
));

$users = User::find_all();
$user = $users[0];
$user->user_name_set("Love");
$user->save();
print_r($user->photos());
print_r($user);

That’s all there to it. And less than 150 lines of code too!

Of course, this is more like a POC. The only stuff implemented are attribute getters and setters, a simple save(), a has_many relationship etc. No validation, the rest of the relationships, eager loading, et. al. But it’s easily doable. If somebody wants access to the github project do let me know! It does require PHP 5.3 though (which is currently alpha 2) but do give it a try: a siege benchmark showed 5.3 to be around 30% faster than 5.2.6 for a simple caffeine (note: that’s a link to my fork: the original is here) application, so 5.3 would be good!

Comments are welcome!