Hey,
I'm a big fan of the pattern (or at least parts of it), which is the reason I spend quite some effort getting a generic interface into MediaWiki. This is the ORMTable class mentioned by Tyler. Documentation of this class, together with a rationale and some implementation notes can be found here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:ORMTable
I ended up creating this because I found myself having to do the same scaffolding work again and again in different extensions, which was really tedious, and caused inconsistency all over the place. The end result is something very light compared to full object relational mappers while it still manages to take away most of the pains of doing such mappings.
@Tyler can you place any suggestions you have on the talk page? Then we can discuss further without hijacking this tread :)
Cheers
-- Jeroen De Dauw http://www.bn2vs.com Don't panic. Don't be evil. --