DevShed continues with their look at design patterns in PHP with the first part of a new series today discussing the Facade pattern as created in PHP 5.

In this case, you have a class that hides all the complexity required for serializing the mentioned objects, but there's also a group of classes that know nothing about the class that called them. As you can see, these classes are only responsible for performing the serialization/unserialization sequence on several objects and nothing else. Period.

The Facade pattern is best seen as an interface between the real meat of the application and the part that displays the results. It provides a buffer between the two to make it easier for the output class to call. They create a basic implementation of this and show how to use compression and provide all the code you'll need to get it working.