In a new post to his blog Federico Cargnelutti takes a look at features available in Ruby and Grails - dynamic finders and method expressions and introduces a PHP library that can parse them.

A dynamic finder method looks like a normal method invocation, but the method itself doesn't exist, instead, the method is generated dynamically and processed via another method at runtime. [...] A method expression is made up of the prefix such as "findBy" followed by an expression that combines one or more properties.

He includes a few examples of each, the finders and expressions, and talks about the class he's developed to handle the method expressions in PHP. It's based on a simple format defining the method, attribute, expression and operator. Code snippet examples are included for SQL statement generation and object parsing. The code for the class is included in the post.