DevShed is starting off a new series today with the first part of their look at design patterns, specifically this time, the Observer pattern.

If you have reached the point in your programming life where you are using design patterns, you will want to read this article. The first of a three-part series, it covers the Observer pattern, which can be just the thing for situations where objects need to send information to a centralized mechanism.

I hope you'll be wondering how all this boring theory can be translated into functional PHP code. That's what I'm going to do in the course of this article, by introducing some friendly examples of how to implement the Observer pattern in PHP applications.

They just right in and create a more practical example, opting for demonstration over a lot of explaination. Their sample code manipulates strings to change them to uppercase and save them off to a file. They attach a basic error logger to it and then conform it to fit in with the Observer pattern style.