The Bootstrapping process in Zend Framework isn't perfect. You'll often end up bootstrapping a lot of resources that you don't need to complete the request. Depending on the resources this can be really expensive and hurt your overall performance. The worst kind are resources that open connections to external services [...], even worse, if the services are down they will end up blocking the execution.

Using his modified "getResource" and "lazyload" methods, he shows you how to modify your resource requests to put them in a temporary state that is only initialized when the resource is needed. You can find the code for this example in this gist.

The best way to show you how using anonymous functions can help you to develop more efficient OO applications is with some functional, hands-on examples. With this idea in mind, in the installment that preceded this one, I implemented an extendable template system. This system could spawn view objects and render the template files associated with these objects.

In this second part of the (two-part) series they include "Serializer" and "FileHandler" classes and show how to use them inside of the closures to lazy-load in data from an external file and work with it as serialized content.