The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted showing you how Laravel Facades work and how they ("Facades") can be used in other framework types.

The Facade pattern is a software design pattern which is often used in object oriented programming. A facade is, in fact, a class wrapping a complex library to provide a simpler and more readable interface to it. The Facade pattern can also be used to provide a unified and well-designed API to a group of complex and poorly designed APIs. The Laravel framework has a feature similar to this pattern, also termed Facades. In this tutorial we will learn how to bring Laravel’s "Facades" to other frameworks.

He starts off by looking at how the Laravel framework has implemented facades through out the entire framework. He includes examples of using these facades (like the App to make a new object instance) and how the base Facade class is structured to make it work. He covers some of the basic features of the classes that extend this base and how they're aliased in the Laravel code/configuration. He then gets into using this same sort of "facade" approach to other frameworks, specifically in an app based on the Silex microframework. He lists some of the requirements and shows how to pull in the base Facade class to extend. He also integrates the aliasing code and configuration to make it simpler to use the short names rather than full namespaced versions of the classes.