Today had quite a number of Zend_Form-related questions in #zftalk. Everything from Decorators to Composite Elements, you know - the usual Zend_Form questions. What better way to answering questions than with a blog post and some sample code?

His illustration of decorators shows how to put each of the form elements inside of a "DI" tag to help makes the lives of the frontend developers that much simpler. For the composite elements he shows how to use them to group a set of selects into one object that is then validated through Zend_Date for valid date information. You can grab the code for each of these illustrations from this account on Github

In PHP5, you can define methods in an object for intercepting calls to methods of an object and for intercepting access to object member variables. These methods (__get, __set and __call) enable the implementation of very generic proxies, decorators and delegators.

This is a great introduction to these three patterns and how to implement them in PHP