Did they realize this themselves?
Their ORM seems to be called Yii Active Record .
From Yii
And Yii Active Record (AR), implemented as a widely used object-relational mapping (ORM) approach, further simplifies database programming. By presenting the table in terms of class and instance string, Yii AR eliminates the repetitive task of writing these SQL statements, which mainly handle CRUD operations (create, read, update, and delete).
This is the documentation for AR: www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/database.ar This is the documentation API: http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/api/1.1/CActiveRecord
I love it. I have been using Yii since a couple of years, and I think AR is very fast :)
Yii ORM is called Active Recording, mainly inspired by the active recording of Ruby on Rails (even if the Active Recording Template is used in many languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_record_pattern ). Of course, it was developed by the Yii development team (basically, its creator Qiang Xue, I think). The same concept is being improved for Yii 2 (still in alpha). The Yii Guide gives an assessment of Ruby on Rails AR when it comes to Named Scopes: http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/database.ar#named-scopes I'm not an expert on Ruby on Rails, but I I know that relationships are defined in a very similar way in two ORMs: http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/database.arr#declaring-relationship p>
Active entry in Ruby on Rails: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
ActiveRecord class in Ruby on Rails: http://ar.rubyonrails.org/
Active entry in Yii: http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/database.ar
CActiveRecord class in Yii: http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/api/1.1/CActiveRecord
Last but not least, the Yii development team on GitHub! https://github.com/yiisoft?tab=members