In yet another of their looks at using patterns in PHP, DevShed has posted the first part of a new three-part series today covering the Decorator patten, useful for adding new or other functionality to prexisting objects.

Due to the wide range of web applications where the decorator pattern can be successfully applied, over the course of this series, I'll show you some useful pointers to demonstrate how this pattern works, and how it can be introduced in your own PHP applications with only minor hassles. Before you start reading the rest of this article, make sure that you have a pretty good understanding of object-based programming with PHP, since you'll see an abundance of material related to this topic.

To help you get started, they start at ground level with a basic class, one to save a string to a file. They then, in a different class, build the Decorator object, adding the ability to reset and display the string. To help out, they also make two other classes to make the string either all uppercase or all lowercase. Finally, they tie them all together, amking an application that adds its functionality on the fly.