Simon Holywell has a new post to his site about a project that aims to be a minimalist ORM library and make it easier to built queries on the fly for your applications (and is installable via Composer) - the Idorm + Paris combination.

Idiorm is a PHP ORM that eschews complexity and deliberately remains lightweight with support for PHP5.2+. [...] However, having said this, Idiorm is very powerful and it makes most of the queries PHP applications require pain free. Some of these features include fluent query building, multiple connection support and result sets for easy record manipulation. Paris sits on top of Idiorm to provide a simplified active record implementation based upon the same minimalist philosophy.

He includes examples in the post of both queries with Idiorm - simple things like creating and finding records - and using Paris to make models out of PHP objects. He also talks some about the current state of the project, recent advancements and some of the things they're looking to do with it in the future (including dropping PHP 5.2 support and use late static binding).

On NetTuts.com today there's a new tutorial posted about using a microframework for prototyping an application you may not need a full stack framework to get running. Their examples are based on the Slim framework.

Let’s face it: we all have great ideas for a web application. Whether you write them down on paper or remember them using your eidetic memory, there comes a point when you want test whether or not your idea is really viable. In this tutorial, we’ll use a micro framework, a templating language and an ORM to rapidly develop an application prototype.

There's an introduction to help you get Slim, some extras, Twig templating and Paris and Idorm set up and working happily together. There's code included for bootstrapping the application, creating a few routes, building models and using them to pull data from the database. They also create an "admin" area for their sample blog application, building an "add article" form and protecting it with a simple login system. You can download the source if you'd like to see it all working together.