DevShed charges right ahead with its emphasis on design patterns in PHP with a new start of a new series today that looks at the Flyweight pattern.

Among the considerable variety of structural design patterns that can be implemented with PHP 4 (and PHP 5, by the way), there's one in particular that deserves special attention. It's easy to apply in the context of a given web application, and it offers remarkable functionality when it comes to preventing the unnecessary instantiation of different classes. This two-part series covers that pattern.

As they explain, the Flyweight pattern helps to keep your code light and simple by preventing the instantiation of unneeded objects and resources. They go with a HTML form example, illustrating how to prevent a submit button or an input button's class to be reinitialized every time a new form field is needed.