Is It A Common Practice To Use Orm In Web Applications?

[Hall of Famer]

Well there are popular ORM products such as Doctrine and Propel, while some frameworks such as Zend and CakePHP have their own ORM method. It is something I did not really quite know of while learning MVC, just grasped a bit of taste of how ORM works very recently. What do you think about ORM? Is it commonly used in most web applications nowadays? Or is it still only minority of web developers apply ORM in their software design?

[trq]

For smaller less complex applications ORM's are great. Once things start to get more complex however, I have found they just get in the way.

 

They make the simple things even simpler and the complex things more complex IMO.

[KevinM1]

I think they're fairly common. Symfony has Doctrine out of the box. I think Propel, too. Kohana had its own Active Record style ORM when I played with it back in the version 2 days. Same with CodeIgniter. Ruby on Rails uses Active Record. ASP.NET MVC has Entity Framework and there are others, like NHibernate.

 

ORMs tend to fall apart with complex queries, especially if you're dealing with many-to-many relationships. Sometimes you just need to roll up your sleeves and write SQL.