This is a pragmatic piece of Fowler on the rather dry topic of Object-relational mappings - in short, the attempt to marry an object-oriented code base with a relational data base.
Usually you’d get enough early success to commit deeply to the framework and only after a while did you realize you were in a quagmire - this is where I sympathize greatly with Ted Neward’s famous quote that object-relational mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science
What Fowler refers to here, is Ted Neward’s article “The Vietnam Of Computer Science”
You can check out my library, Nymph.js. It’s what powers Port87.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a whole lot of open source code showing how to use it, since it was developed specifically for Port87, which isn’t open source. But there are test files that show how to use it.