DDD using Doctrine 2: A case study

Nowadays developing web applications usually requires a flexible process due to changing business logic, shifting priorities or new insights. Besides choosing the right methodology this also requires designing the application in such a way that this flexibility can be achieved.

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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DPC 2011 preview

The yearly dutch PHP event is getting close so time to check out the schedule. Once again there are lots of interesting sessions to choose from so I probably will miss some of the good stuff. Mixing ‘simply interesting’ and ‘directly usable in day-to-day job’ results in the preliminary list: Day 1 TDD and Getting Paid – Because indeed TDD is good and can be hard to keep doing thoroughly Pursuing practices of Domain-Driven Design in PHP – Fits both the ‘interesting’ and ‘directly usable’ categories.…

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Dutch PHP Conference (DPC) 2010

Past weekend the Amsterdam RAI was the centre of the PHP universe as there the 2010 edition of the Dutch PHP Conference was held. Similar to past year it consisted of two presentation days, which I attended, preceded by a tutorial day. Among the presentations I attended on the first day were: Kevlin Henney’s keynote presentation, titled 97 Things every programmer should know. I suppose every attendant will have recognised some of the things he addressed, like “Do lots of deliberate practice” or “Hard work does not pay off”.…

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Using Zend_Form without Zend Framework MVC

Most components of Zend Framework can be used without using the entire framework and Zend_Form is no exception. It’s a versatile component that can be customized to great extent. The payoff is that seemingly easy tasks can seem quite complex to complete and involve concepts like Decorators and View Helpers. Complexity is increased by the fact that most tasks can be achieved in multiple ways. Forms in general are elements where a lot of parts of an application ‘meet’: Frontend code (HTML/CSS), behavior (JS) and backend processing (validation, filtering and storage).…

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Catching PHP Exceptions: Except the unexpected

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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PHPBenelux meeting at Freshheads

Yesterday (sept. 29th) I went to the Freshheads office in Tilburg to attend the monthly PHPBenelux meeting. As it appeared it was right around the corner of the 013 venue so it was an easy find. Two talks were scheduled and Stefan Koopmanschap kicked off the meeting with a presentation titled “Integrating Symfony and Zend Framework” (slides). After a short introduction pointing out the benefits of using any framework at all, Stefan showed how both Symfony’s and Zend Framework’s autoloaders can be initialized in the application’s bootstrap code.…

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Controlled initialization of domain objects

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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DPC09 down, DPC10 to go

The biggest PHP event in Holland is over. Two great days have passed and it feels like it were just two hours. I didn’t attend the tutorial day so at friday after a brief intro by Cal Evans (with great cartoony visuals) the event kicked off with the opening keynote by Andrei Zmievski. A talk about what makes PHP the language it is and about where PHP is heading with 5.3 and 6. It had humor, appealing imagery and a nice metaphor comparing PHP to a ball of nails: ‘whatever you throw it at it sticks to’. For me what showed the maturity of PHP, was the fact PHP6 is undergoing (or will so) compatibility tests with respect to packages like Drupal, WordPress and Zend Framework.

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Explicit PHP6?

Some days ago I read Fabien Potencier’s post ‘What for PHP 6’ pointing me to some features that might be implemented in PHP6. Two of those would have been nice in a project I’m currently working on where I’ve been experimenting with ‘domain objects’ having ‘scalar’ or ‘value’ objects as properties (more on that later). The first is scalar type hinting and hinted return values. The other is a __cast() method that replaces (or complements __toString()). Now that sounds quite java-ish and one of PHP merits is it’s flexibility but having the option to be more strict in my opinion is a good thing: If I feed my application with garbage I don’t blame it for being equally blunt.

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Zend_Test, Zend_Layout and the need to reset

In a recent Zend Framework project I’ve used Zend_Test to test the functioning of the website ‘as a whole’. So besides testing the separate (authorization) components, the website was tested in the same way a visitor would use it. This is especially useful for testing login scenarios, so I added the test below:

public function testLogoutShouldDenyAccess()
{
    $this->login();

         // verify that profile page now doesn't contain login form
    $this->dispatch('/profile');
    $this->assertQueryCount('form#login', 0);

        // dispatch logout page
    $this->dispatch('/login/logout');

        // verify that profile now holds login form
    $this->dispatch('/profile');
    $this->assertQueryCount('form#login', 1);
    $this->assertNotController('profile');
}

This failed on the last assertQueryCount() which left me puzzled. Performing above steps manually seemed to work fine so I was overlooking something either in my app-code or the test-code.

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