Sorry if this question seems "noobish".

Thanks in advance!
Matt

Thanks...

I do not completely agree with the idea, because I believe a developer must be an intelligent guy. After reading something like this on Matthew Weier O'Phinney's blog, I guess I understood better of what we are trying to do here. It's not only about hiding Zend_Db, because we are not only talking about one model here. I was thinking like that (there is only user and nothing else), but there is also a list of users and some other things too. So you should be able to hide them too and this is what you are doing. Thanks for the reply.

In my experience, it requires a lot of self-discipline to not do stuff in the controller that should be in the model. With a team of programmers of varying abilities, it's best to make it extremely hard to do it wrong.

Regards,

Rob...

It might be a pretty dumb question to ask, but why the extra effort to create lots of classes and extending them to hide Zend_db from your application individually.

The problem IMHO, is to hide Zend_Db from your application. And when I mean Zend_Db I talk about everything. Preventing the usage of it's methods, like select or something, somewhere else then your models, because you might need to move on from connecting to databases to a web service to get your data.

So All we need to do is creating methods on my models and only using them to get/save/update data. About more than one tables, if you start writing your own queries in your model, you will write every query you want. The next problem occurs because of usage of Zend_Db_Table's methods like fetch which returns a Zend_Db_Table_Row or equivalent. When you start to write your own sql queries, you can tell to fetch results to Objects, which then creates a php built-in StandardObject.

No need to create lots of extra classes and lines of code to hide all the zend_db layers individually. My approach is basically hiding everything behind one model, which is used everywhere in my application.

I understand that the model here is the next iteration of my approach. With adding extra abilities to the StandartObject and basically improving it's usage (like adding save or update features (powers?) on it, I do this with a save method on my model which takes an associative array and executes an update/insert statement).

The model here might be a better OOP approach too, I just want to figure out why all the extra work?

Sorry if my question is very dumb and noobish.

thanks