Evan Coury has a new post to his blog about using ZendDb's TableGateway (from the Zend Framework 2) along with the HydratingResultSet feature to let you build objects from your database results.

The new ZendDb in Zend Framework 2 has a handy feature which allows you to specify your own entity/model class to represent rows in your database tables. This means you can tell ZendDb to return each row as a populated instance of your own custom objects. Keep in mind that this is simply a convenience feature, and not meant to serve as a fully-featured ORM. If you're looking for a full-blown ORM, have a look at Doctrine 2.

He includes some example SQL to create a "book" table and the ZF2 code to create the Book model, set up the database connection and generate the hydrated data set from the results. An example of doing an insert into the table and then pull it back out from the TableGateway object.