On the SitePoint PHP blog today Sandeep Panda has a new article looking at routing, using Active Record and caching with the Yii Framework. The Yii framework is a " a high-performance PHP framework best for developing Web 2.0 applications".

Almost all modern web apps have 3 major concerns: Retrieving data from a database easily and effectively, caching the web content and URL rewriting to create user friendly URLs. Yii, like any other good framework, offers simple and easy solutions to all of the above. [...] In this tutorial we will look at how Yii greatly simplifies the development of database driven websites with its Active Record support. Additionally, Yii lets you further improve your websites by implementing user friendly URLs and powerful caching techniques.

He creates a simple application based on the Yii framework skeleton called "gadgetstore" that works with fictional phone data. He shows how to set up a few sample routes and adding the "phone" table to the database. He then uses the framework's tools to auto-generate the model and shows the save/delete operations. He then creates the "Phone" controller and an add action to handle the create submissions. Finally, he gets into caching the response data and uses the built-in "cache" function for the models to store the results of a "findAll" request.