Play-dough: How to Model Your PHP Objects

Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectures are the norm these days in the PHP community. However, while everyone seems to understand and have opinions on how Controllers and Views might work and interact, the Model languishes in a position of being simply "data access". Indeed, most frameworks, PHP and otherwise, tend to focus on modelling solutions that are tied directly to the database, with no regard or attention to how to test or the fact that a database is simply one way to persist the data in a model.

In this session, we'll look at how to use objects to _model_ entities, and some techniques for then perisisting the model data and metadata -- via databases, caching, and web services. In addition, we'll look at how to separate the model from data persistence, and how this can benefit both test driven development and rapid application development.