As a part of his "Advancing PHP Developer" series, Eran Galperin has posted part five, a look at design patterns and what they can do for you and your application.

A design pattern is a general reusable solution to a recurring design problem in object-oriented systems. Design patterns are essentially blueprints that suggest how to solve a particular set of OO design problems while adhering to OO best good-practices (which I've recounted in my Object Oriented part of this series).

He talks about one of the most popular examples - the Model/View/Controller design pattern that is used in many rapid development frameworks for PHP (including CodeIgniter and the Zend Framework). He also briefly mentions a few others like the composite, singleton and decorator patterns.

Other parts of this series include looks at testing, refactoring and coding standards.

In his continuing look at using the composite design pattern inside the Zend Framework views (as helpers), Pádraic Brady has posted part three demonstrating the creation of complex views.

In this post, I offer a brief explanation of the Composite View pattern. It's beyond its scope to show an implementation using the Zend Framework though that's what I'm building up to accomplish in a later blog entry.

He goes through what the design pattern is (including a UML diagram showing it's relations) and how it's commonly used. Following this, he shows a little bit of the code in action that includes the use of an attach() method to include the "child Views" at certain locations.

In a new blog entry, Pádraic Brady (and fellow developers) start off their look at the Zend Framework. They begin with a foundation structure (Java BluePrints Pet Shop for J2EE's example) and work up from there to develop their own application. Unfortunately, when they get to the Views of the app, things get a little tricky:

Back on track, the main problem of a complex View, is that the current Controller is only aware of a subset of its own required Model (data) and the current View. So how do do you get the View to include extra sections - for example, details from Technorati for your blog - which are common to ALL pages?

The framework's documentationComposite View and View Helper combination, to accomplish the "reusable page bits" they need.

DevShed has posted the second and last part of a series of two articles based around the Composite design pattern - using it to work with strings in PHP5.

Are you a PHP developer who wants to improve your skills in pattern-based programming in PHP? If the answer to this question is a emphatic yes, then you should begin reading this article now! Welcome to the final part of the series "Implementing the composite pattern with PHP 5." Comprised of two instructive tutorials, this series walks you through the basic concepts of this important design pattern, and shows you how to apply it with some educational examples.

They start by defining a simple StringProcessor class as an abstract interface to build from. From there, they create two other classes - the SingleStringProcessor and the MultipleStringProcessor. Each of these takes in either a single file or multiple filenames and spits back out the value of the string and the length of the string.

Continuing their look at design patterns, DevShed has kicked off yet another series today spotlighting the Composite pattern as used in PHP5.

The composite pattern is one of the less commonly used patterns in PHP 5. Nevertheless, in certain situations, it is very helpful. This article, the first one in a two-part series, will introduce you to the basic concepts of the composite pattern.

The composite pattern allows you to define a single or multiple objects that will have identical behavior - basically behaving the same if there's just one or with the multiple instances. They start with the basics, reaching for one of their standard examples - a file information reader - to illustrate their point. They create the two helper classes it needs to work, one for the single file read and another for the multiple file read. The finish by combining them all together for a file-reading fiesta, showing how to get a one shot info dose as well adding files to the list and grabbing their info all together.

Davey Shafik has an interesting use for the recently released Zend Framework - an app that grabs 50 random images from Flickr and combines them.

As you most likely know, I have been working with Zend on the Zend Framework for a couple of months now. The bulk on my tasks there have been working on the Zend_Service* set of classes. This includes the Amazon, Flickr and Yahoo! APIs.

So, as I'm getting more and more into flickr (see http://flickr.com/dshafik for my photo stream) I have been exploring and I saw a very neat set of images which were composites of 50 random flickr images for a given tag.

Well, I liked this enough, I decided that I could do it on-the-fly using PHP, ImageMagick? and of course... the Zend Framework.

You can check out the actual application here, and for those that love getting the background story, the source is here.