By now everyone's heard about one of the more powerful and major advancements made in the PHP 5.3.x series of the language - closures. You might have read a description of them and been left wondering what a practical application might be to help drive the point home. Vance Lucas has written up a post to help with just that.

If you’re like me, you might be wondering what the practical uses for these new features are before you can rightly justify diving in and using them in new or existing projects. I experimented a lot with closures and possible uses over the past few weeks, and came up with some compelling reasons to start using them.

He's come up with five different examples of how you can use this handy feature:

• Templating
• Dynamic Code Extension
• Delayed Execution
• Caching
• Convenience (as in their role in one-off functions for callbacks)

Each of the tips comes with a bit of code (except delayed execution, that's a bit more involved) to help explain the point a bit more.