Chris,

We've got a young (but fast and fun :-) ORM already, and it makes some very different choices from ActiveRecord. Among them, we explicitly list columns as public instance vars in the class file--annotated with types in special doc comments--and we think that kind of being explicit is a *good* thing.

The syntax in your ActiveRecord clone is more elegant in many places, but if we do decide to go PHP 5.3 only, we'll be able to close that gap. (How how HOW did they ever think early static binding was a good idea?)

-Joshua