There are features in every language that developers love to have - in PHP, there are some impressive string and array handling functions that some developers would like to carry over. Unfortunately, there are also some bits of functionality that haven't quite made it to PHP yet - namely collections. In other languages, such as Java or C#, these handy containers let you hold objects for use later. PHP lacks this kind of functionality inherently, but this new DevShed article might just have a way around it.

A collection is an object whose primary function is to store a number of like objects. An object called CarCollection may contain any number of Car objects. Collections can traditionally be accessed in the same manner as arrays, which means CarCollection[n] represents a particular Car object. This is true in C#, Java, and more - but not PHP, unfortunately. Since PHP has only recently begun to develop a package of built in objects (the SPL, Standard PHP Library), the ability to support collections in the accepted behavioral sense is very limited.

Their mission is to work with a datatype that PHP does have to simulate this kind of collection handling - arrays. They walk you through the creation of a foundation class, one that simply allows you to get and fetch from the array. Extending that makes it possible to create a customized method for sorting personal data (name).