On the PHPro.org website, Kevin Waterson has written up an introduction to the handy autoloading functionality that comes with PHP5 releases - the __autoload method from the Standard PHP Library (SPL).

The SPL __autoload() method is one of the Magic Methods supplied in PHP. The __autoload method is called whenever a class is instantiated and will load the classs the the first time it is called. No longer is include(), require, include_once() or require_once needed as the SPL autoload takes care of this interally.

He looks at how you can use it to load a directory of classes, how to use multiple autoloads in a single script and how to use it with interfaces to register a loader and include it as needed.

Etienne Kneuss has posted about some updates to the data structures functionality in the Standard PHP Library (SPL), specifically some new additions.

There finally is documentation for SplDoublyLinkedList, SplStack and SplQueue and some "new" classes: SplHeap (abstract), SplMaxHeap, SplMinHeap and SplPriorityQueue, documentation of those classes is in progress.

An example of the new functionality (for SplPriorityQueue) is included in the post showing the insertion of a value into a pre-existing array (without having to slice or splice!).

Larry Garfield points out one of the better resources for those looking to learn about the Standard PHP Library functionality - the tutorial on the Zend Developer Zone.

Of course, the main problem is that the official documentation on it sucks. At best it points to an off-site series of class hierarchies. (Technically it's not off-site, but not internal to the manual.)

The article talks mainly about iterators and some other "goodies" including exceptions and array handling.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new article/tutorial from Ben Ramsey covering one of the more powerful bits of functionality that's included with PHP5 - the Standard PHP Library (SPL).

As its name implies, the goal of the Standard PHP Library-or SPL, for short-is to provide a standard library of interfaces that allows developers to take full advantage of object-oriented programming in PHP 5. [...] The functionality it provides includes, for example, the ability to define how your objects will react when iterated over with foreach, advanced array access, file and directory access, and advanced SimpleXML object handling. The largest chunk of functionality that the SPL provides comes in the form of iterators.

Ben focuses on the iterators - three different kinds: IteratorAggregate, RecursiveIterator and SeekableIterator. The SPL also comes with a few other built-in kinds of iterators he mentions as well:

• ArrayIterator
• DirectoryIterator
• FileIterator

As a bonus, he also talks about other "goodies" the SPL has to offer like exceptions, array handling, and file/directory access.

Also, check out Ben's comments on his own blog about the article.