Adrian Schneider has started up a new series of posts on his blog today with part of of his look at models in the Zend Framework.

The power in Zend Framework lies in its uncompromising flexibility. However, evidently, this also means its very difficult for new ZF users to pick up the framework and hit the ground running. The most common question I see is usually "where is the model?". The goal of this post is to show some examples and hopefully some new ideas on how to tackle models. There is no one-size-fits-all solution folks. Let's look at some options and some background...

He starts off with the concept behind models, explaining how they're just a place to get your data from whether it be in a database or other resource. Processing that happens to your application's data belongs in a model. He illustrates a database model that uses the Zend_Db_Table component to connect to a backend database. There's only a bit of introductory code in this first post, so expect that to come in the parts to follow.