In his latest post Stephan Hochdörfer shows you how to define Phing tasks according to the PSR-0 autoloading format. Phing is a PHP-based automation tool that uses an XML configuration to execute a series of tasks.

Before anybody complains: I know that "as of 2014-10-21 PSR-0 has been marked as deprecated. PSR-4 is now recommended as an alternative." - Anyway I still think this little gem makes sense to be shared because a lot of people are probably not aware of it. I recently found out by accident that it is possible pass a task name in PSR-0 style to the "taskdef" task. In the old days you had to use the Java-like dot-style notation like this and also define the classpath to make sure the class could be loaded correct! This is ok if the task resides in the same project. If the task is located in a dependent package loaded via Composer this can get ugly.

The post is quick but provides two very handy code examples, one showing the old "dot notation" version and the other showing how to make use of the autoloader. The trick is in the classname value and using the full namespace/class name rather than the dot notation.