During 4Developers I met some friends who are PHP and Perl developers. They were very interested in what kind of value Domain Driven Design may bring to them.
They found the topic very confusing because in their opinion speakers were strongly focused on Java and Object-Oriented programming. Those developers made connection between DDD and OO-programing especially in Java and C#. I think it's kind of misunderstanding.
Let's see some examples of what domain expert could say (credits to Sławek):
Domain expert says:
When a piece of art is viewed as a thumbnail by a customer, one is able to show interests in this piece of by adding it to the LightBox.
The system should generate the offer from the reservation.
An offer contains just only available products with current prices.
A customer is not obliged to accept the offer. One is able to accept or reject it as well.
and so forth...
So we have some domain scenarios in a very unstructured form as were expressed by the expert.
To build the right software we model a domain base on expert knowledge and domain scenarios.
And here I wanna to put strict distinction: the goal is to model the domain but using building blocks given by DDD community is just a way to achieve this goal in the Object-Oriented world.
In my opinion pure DDD modeling should be based on Domain-Specific Languages when we have language to directly express what the expert says and how the domain works. This programing style is even easier to apply with some script and loosely typed languages.
So, if you are non Java/C#/OO professional, please be sure you may get benefits with using DDD. You don't need building blocks in the form they are currently presented, because they are implementation of DDD in Object-Oriented context. The core is to model the domain and maintain pure isolated model in a form suitable to the technology you use.
