In a post to his site Benjamin Eberlei looks at global state in PHP using something called "context objects" and how they can be used as an alternative to true global state.

Global State is considered bad for maintainability of software. Side effects on global state can cause a very nasty class of bugs. Context objects are one flavour of global state. For example, I remember that Symfony1 had a particularly nasty context object that was a global singleton containing references to very many services of the framework.

As with every concept in programming, there are no absolute truths though and there are many use-cases where context objects make sense. This blog posts tries to explain my reasons for using context objects.

He starts by getting everyone on the same page by defining a context - the "circumstances in which something can be fully understood". He then moves into the world of context objects, talking about how they encapsulate the information other objects need to execute. They're essentially "container" objects that allow for more control that something like the normal PHP superglobals. From there he helps you define what kind of context objects you might need in your application and provides a real-world example from his own experience at Tideways.