How badly do we want ORM?

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
Most likely, no outside ORM will use CI's db library or active record class. And Propel (if I remember it correctly) in particular is an inelegant solution, in that it uses XML to describe models (which is elegant when talked about but inelegant to program with). I was not actually talking about modeling data- CI already has models. I was talking about extending data objects to make them more expressive to work with. Granted, this does not fully embody the paradigm of ORM, but then again, CI doesn't embody the full paradigm of MVC.

PHP is not an extremely expressive language to use for modeling, anyway. It's kind of a web templating tool for Perl that got away from its authors

Anyway, my tactic is to prototype a basic result struct for each row returned that would have methods for saving, deleting, and finding related records across relationships, introspected from the query itself.