Domain Driven Design fits this process as it isolates business logic in the Domain layer and separates it from infrastructure and presentation layers. Questions like where or how to store data or what to build (website, mobile app, API) can be addressed separately.

Doctrine 2 provides PHP developers with a powerful tool to create a Domain layer that contains business logic that is easy to unit test and therefore easy to expand upon in iterations.

In this article I will show how to implement a specific case using Doctrine 2. Full code accompanying this article can be found on GitHub.

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PHP Exceptions can greatly assist in implementing various error scenario’s into an application. Before PHP5 one had to resort to specific return values or drastic measures like trigger_error(). Planning exceptions, I found out, is just as important as class design. At any point where a developer needs to handle the possibility of an exception being thrown he needs to know:

• What Exceptions can I expect?
• What Exceptions do I plan to catch?

In this post I’ll show some important aspects to consider when planning exceptions.

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In a recent project I’ve been working on, we have used the ‘Domain Model‘ to describe and design our application. Doing so we decouple persistency logic from the objects that are being passed around and modified throughout our application: The Domain objects. So what in MVC is often referred to as ‘model’ is actually a combination of a persistency layer, a service layer and a Domain layer. The persistency and service layer are also referred to as Data Access Objects: DAO. (As for the why and how of this architecture I recommend the article Writing robust backends with Zend Framework. For a good description of the DAO concept look here).

One of the challenges we were facing was that on one hand we wanted to implement business rules in our Domain objects. In plainish english: On setting or changing properties of the object (like changing a status) we want to validate if that action is allowed. On the other hand we want to be able to initialize an object to whatever state corresponds with the data fetched from the persistency layer. Doing so we found that the business rules got in the way during initialization when fetching it from the persistency layer. So what we were looking for was a way to allow the service layer to construct a Domain object using methods that are hidden from the rest of the code. We found two ways:

1. Reflection (as of PHP 5.3)
2. A design pattern where the Domain object initializes itself using the provided Service object.

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Over the years the display size of the average computer screen has increased. As a consequence nowadays more and more websites are designed with a 1024 width screen in mind. For example: BBC, Adobe and The New York Times. With at least 78% of the users using a 1024 or higher resolution screen the time seems right to move away from the 800px designs. But what about accessibility? And usability? And is full page zooming really better than text scaling?

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