Earlier this month Rafael Dohms posted a new article to his blog looking at a feature of PHP it seems not every developer knows about - the Standard PHP Library (or SPL).

By a show of hands, how many people here ever heard of SPL? How many already used it? Chances are most of you didn't raise your hands, and some might even have a confused look on their faces. Indeed that is the sad reality when it comes to SPL, but What is SPL?

He goes on to look at a few different things the SPL has to offer like autoloader overloading, iterators (with an included list of 21 of them) and the SplFixedArray that can be used to help speed up array access and manipulation.