On the Ibuildings techPortal today there's a new post from Robert Raszczynski about domain modeling and how a good knowledge of it can help your application's architecture.

Architectural and design patterns help software architects to break systems in to smaller, more maintainable sections organised by their functionality and usage. [...] There are three major layers in software architecture: presentation, domain and data source. [...] Now that we know what types of layers we can find in software architecture, let's have a look at how we can organize domain logic and data sources layers.

He looks at three patterns that can help organize your domain logic - a transactional script (one file that does one thing), a table module (logic lives in the tables) and his focus, the domain model. He shows (via a graph) how the domain logic approach can cut through some of the effort it could take to improve on the other two. He gives a two suggestions of how to access the data in your domain layer - a Gateway or a Data Mapper. To reinforce the ideas he's presented, he includes some code snippets of a basic domain model for a Store, Customer and Product and uses them in both Gateway and Data Mapper examples.

In a recent post Matt Williams shares how to integrate your application with the PayPal IPN payment gateway service.

PayPal has a huge API reference to integrate it's services into any website. But from personal experience I found that the theory is far more simple than the practice. There are various methods to implement PayPal's services including Soap webservices with 'Express Checkout' and 'Website Payment Pro'. This tutorial will focus on 'Website Payment Pro' and the 'IPN' event listener.

He shows how to send the information as a POST request in one of two ways - as a standard form submission kind of POST and from a script opening a direct socket to the PayPal server and sending over a well-formed request.

Stuart Herbert has decided to get in on the action and enter himself into the WinPHP Challenge (as sponsored by Ibuildings).

Generally, folks choose to deploy web-based applications on Windows Server because they already have Windows Server. Selling them something that will only work on Linux is a tough sell, so a competition like this that seeks to show off how well PHP works on Windows should be another small step forward for all those small ISVs like Box UK who want to sell products written in PHP - provided Microsoft actually do something marketing-wise with the results.

His idea is to build a PHP/.NET tool that can act as a web services gateway. He's already started development and blogs about getting the environment all set up - Windows Server 2008, IIS7 and PHP 5.2.9 For Windows.

He's made another post with an update on his status - finishing out the development environment with PHP up and running, setting up a database, picking an IDE (Visual Studio) and setting up a version control system (git).

In this post he takes about what he's trying to achieve with his application and some use case examples and in this other post some of the feedback he's gotten about his dev environment.

Juozas Kaziukenas points out a new class in his latest blog post that can be used to make secure connections over to PayPal (encrypted) using their Encrypted Website Payment method.

In my situation, PayPal is only used to pay for orders - cart and order setup is done in our shop, so I do not want to have additional problems with users changing orders numbers, amount to be paid, etc. [...] Only PayPal knows how to decrypt it, because it uses public key encryption technology (you need to upload your certificate in PayPal account).

Some sample usage code is included as is a link to the class itself. His example takes a payment transaction including the item name, amount and currency type and sends it off to the PayPal servers in a connection protected by certificates.

Attila Szabo has come up with a class that makes sending SMS messages from your site simple (through the smsBug gateway).

I wrote a simple PHP class for sending SMS messages through smsBug gateway. It can send a single SMS message and receive the number of credits left (see the UML diagram of the classes below). You need to include two classes into your PHP code.

He includes an example of it in use (sending a single SMS message to a phone) as well as a demo of it in action and a link to the download where you can grab the class for yourself.

From this post on Ajaxian.com today, there's a look at a new PHP-based library/framework to help with Flash remoting - AMFPHP.

MFPHP is an open-source implementation of the Flash Remoting framework. It's fast, reliable, 100% free and open-source. With this new version we have strived to make a product as stable and full-featured as ColdFusion-based remoting (the reference implementation).

You also get to use the wonderful NetConnection debugger, which shows you exactly what's being sent between the client and server. Remoting uses AMF, a very lightweight binary format that cuts the bulk out of packets, meaning data exchange is a lot faster than with XML.

You can get the complete details from their homepage or just dive right in to their documentation...