In a new post to his site Mark Baker take a look at anonymous classes, a new feature in PHP 7, and a challenge he took on to figure out how to apply traits to them at runtime.

One of the more interesting new features introduced to PHP with the arrival of version 7 is Anonymous Classes. [...] Then back in January (as I was waiting for my flight to the continent for PHPBenelux) I was intrigued by a request to find a way of dynamically applying Traits to a class at run-time. With time on my hands as I was sitting in the airport, I considered the problem.

His first idea was to build an anonymous class, extending the requested class that would come along with the traits/properties/functionality of the original class. He includes some of the code he tried to implement this solution and ultimately figured out that a factory would be a good approach to creating the structure. After doing some research he found a way to create the factory using some eval magic. However, this wasn't "the end of the story" as he found out some other interesting things about anonymous classes (such as the fact that they're linked to only one instance of a class, making them less reusable).