On DevShed today there's the start of a new series looking at design patterns in PHP applications. In this first part of the series, they look at lazy and eager loading.

In the case of PHP 5, which is better suited for developing web-based programs, there are two complementary design patterns that can be of great help in building faster and more reliable applications. Of course, as this article's title suggests, I'm talking about the lazy and eager loading patterns. Despite their rather funny names, they are pretty easy to implement in PHP 5-controlled environments.

To illustrate, they've created a sample class that uses a few class properties and a __toString method to return the values.