In software development projects, paying proper attention to usability aspects, can greatly help ‘getting the message functionality across’. Usability is a field of expertise on its own and involves techniques like wireframes, prototyping and card sorting. Not every project is the same and (sadly) lack of time or budget can prevent specialized interaction designers to be involved in the project. This means that making the application ‘usable’ becomes the responsibility of graphic designers or developers (or it is neglected altogether). Not an easy combination of tasks…

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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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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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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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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');
}

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At my work PHPUnit is ‘just there’ but it’s not on my home machine where I’m running an out of the box XAMPP Lite setup. So I visited the PHPUnit installation manual and all looked easy:

pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
pear install phpunit/PHPUnit

But what I got was a message saying my pear installer was out of date, 1.7.1 was needed. Running ‘pear -V’ showed:

E:\Xampplite\php>pear -V
PEAR Version: 1.4.5
PHP Version: 5.2.5
Zend Engine Version: 2.2.0
Running on: Windows NT T1720 6.0 build 6000

Allright, upgrading PEAR it is. That was not as straightforward as hoped.

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