The SPL, or Standard PHP Library, is an often overlooked extension in the PHP core. It first came on the scene in PHP 5 and a variety of iterators constituted the majority of its initial offerings. Though the iterator offerings were expanded in PHP 5.3, the particularly interesting additions to the SPL were several specialized data structure classes, the foundational concepts for which originate in the field of computer science. In this post, I will provide an overview of these new classes and explain why and when they should be used.

Matthew talks about some of the new advancements in working with arrays, creating fixed arrays, handling lists (linked and doubly-linked), stackes, queues, heaps and hash maps. He also includes some benchmark information and graphs of some tests he ran comparing the SPL methods to some of their normal PHP counterparts.