models: fundamental question referring to member variables

Hi,

as a newbie to cakephp for me it looks like that 'normal' models don't
have any more common member variables, but associative arrays.

For example I have a model 'Person' with firstname, lastname, age etc.

Generally i would solve this with member variables $firstname,
$lastname and $age and their common getters and setters
setFirstname($value), getAge(), etc., but this still does have sense?
When i save a person i have to use an associative array, so with my
technique i need to create first an array ($data = array()) out of my
common member variables to pass it to model's function ->save($data)

Does it mean that the common member variables are obsolete and i
actually only have to use one member variable $data and use it then
like:

function setFirstname($value){ $this->data['firstname'] = $value;}; or
function getAge(){ return $this->data['age']; }; ?

The same when i want to make a new instance of a Person and retrieve
their variables from the database:
Does it has to look like following then?

$person = new Person();
$person->retrieve(5); // ID

and the model Person has a function retrieve($id) when i get then its
data from the database and set it to $this->data??

I hope i made me explain at least a little and you understand my
question :)
Thanks for any advice or example!

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