Hey all, I am a complete PHP noob, just switching over from another language cos I have to

Am I the only one who thinks this is really ugly? Why doesn't the Zend Framework have an elegant solution for something as simple as this? If I ever want to create a descent web application, don't I have to join all the time?

What I am more worried about, and just want to verify: if I create an instance of Asset and then just call Asset->getAssetInfo(), will it make more trips to teh database then just the one select statement? in other words, instantiating Asset will not generate any database traffic (for metadata or otherwise) until I call fetchAll on it, right?

Sorry for all the questions. As I said, I'm new to all this