Brandon Savage has posted a quick look at using one of the more popular design patterns - Registry - to handle object storage and retrieval.

One of the biggest challenges in OOP programming with PHP is the ability to pass around objects and let other objects use them. This challenge can be solved with careful design, however. Here we will discuss the registry pattern, not a member of the GoF's original patterns but still an important pattern nonetheless.

He looks at a few different ways to solve a few different problems - first, sharing a database resource between multiple objects, then making sure that you have a connection no matter where its called from and finally - what the registry is used for - sharing multiple database connections between multiple objects. He uses static methods in an abstract class to handle the set/get of the correct object.

There's also a bit of discussion about the registry pattern versus dependency injection and which is better for most instances.