Paragon is a fully-featured Object Relational Mapper (ORM). It is to be used as a parent class for the Model in any PHP Model-View-Controller (MVC) codebase, or even as a standard ORM and data access layer in a non-MVC codebase. Paragon was written and is maintained by Brandon Goldman and is released as open source under the MIT License. Paragon is largely inspired by ActiveRecord from Ruby on Rails.