[webjprgm]

That's what I do. I have a DB class in PHP that makes most queries easy (much easier than Pear or PDO), and all DAOs are similar to each other so it's a copy-paste-modify to add a new one.

Then I have static methods to do the special queries that the post author talks about, which may return direct result sets, an integer, generated objects with fewer columns, or large object trees depending on the case.

ORM would be faster (developer time) for a prototype site, but do-it-yourself DAOs work just fine.