On Paul Jones' blog today, he talks about something that's coming up more and more (and has especially been mentioned in PHp with all of the new frameworks popping up) - fluent interfaces.

My friend and coworker Mike Naberezny wrote recently of fluent interfaces (a.k.a. object chaining). The idea is that the fluent interface makes it very easy to read the resulting code in a way that flows naturally. This is cool, but I want to add a caveat to his examples.

I think, for a fluent interface to be effective, you need situations where you actually have all that information at one time so that you can chain the methods in a fluid way.

Paul continues, talking about that "something more" that might be needed to get this kind of thing working in PHP - the need to have all of the information that's going to be chained at once.