Devshed is continuing their look at OOP and design patterns (started here) with the second part of the series - a look at the Adapter and Template Patterns. It's another excerpt from Advanced PHP Programming by George Schlossnagle.

You have likely heard of design patterns, but you might not know what they are. Design patterns are generalized solutions to classes of problems that software developers encounter frequently.

To claim that a single chapter on design patterns is in any way complete would be ridiculous. The following sections explore a few patterns, mainly as a vehicle for showcasing some of the advanced OO techniques available in PHP.

They cover the Adapter pattern first, showing how it can be used to create an alternative to an API object (a database layer, in their case). They follow this up with a quick look at the Template pattern, handy to create a set of "hidden" values inside of a extended class.