title: activerecord as model, is this a good idea?
body: <p>Recently thanks to rails' popularity, many people start using activerecord as model. however, before I heard of rails (my peer group was not a fan of open source stuff, we were taught in a .NET school...) and while I was doing my final year project, i found this definition for a model</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>The model represents enterprise data and the business rules that govern access to and updates of this data. Often the model serves as a software approximation to a real-world process, so simple real-world modeling techniques apply when defining the model.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>it doesn't say the model should represent one table as what activerecord does. And normally within a transaction, one may have to query a few unrelated tables and then manipulate data from different tables... so if activerecord is used as model, then either one would have to cram all the logic code into the controller (which is kinda popular in some php frameworks) that makes it difficult to test or hack the activerecord model so that it performs database operation on not only the table it maps to, but also other related tables as well...</p>
  
  <p>so, what is so great about abusing (IMHO) activerecord as the model in a MVC architectural pattern?</p>