It's one of the gems in PHP that I find to be relatively under used. It's common for PHP applications to break out classes into their own files. This becomes cumbersome when working on large projects as you wind up with numerous include/require calls for any given page.

He shows an example of its usage (loading class files dynamically from a specified directory) and mentions how it can help to make your code a lot less ugly. Comments on the post range in topics - from comparing it to include paths, how the idea was borrowed from PEAR, and how proper naming conventions can make its use even easier.

I'm an outsider when it comes to tracking the going-on in the world of PHP internals. So, because of that, I'm not going to comment on the actual syntax of how namespaces will be implemented or it's impact on internals. That's not really important as far as this particular discussion goes.

He mentions one of the primary arguments for namespaces from the casual developer's perspective - keeping things separate and so classes can have the same naming as some of their cousins in other namespaces.

The issue Derick pointed out:

In PHP 5.3 this would alias the class Interval in the namespace PEAR::Date to the class Interval. For now, this code would work just fine. However, if PHP would introduce a class "Interval" at some point in the future (and PHP can do this as it owns the global namespace) then the above code would suddenly stop working.

Greg's patch makes it possible to "override" the internal class if need be, making it so that code currently working wouldn't break. All it takes is to "use" is like you normally would and and the magic happens behind the scenes.

I've been working some with jQuery and Ruby lately, as you might know they both have very neat fluent interfaces for writing short and easily understandable code. Especially Ruby's array and string handling should be something that can be done in PHP so I started googling. [...] It's probably very possible that what I'm looking for is already part of some PHP framework or such but I didn't want to spend more time looking than being productive.

Based on some Ruby examples, he defines a set of functions that can be use to create these fluent interfaces to the common PHP variable types (contained in a class for easy use). The entire source can be downloded here.

Well, if you are into duck typing style of programming, it may be interesting for you to have an object that implements certain set of functions, but not necessary declares it at class definition. Languages like Smalltalk do it all day along, so why PHP couldn't?

His example defines an interface Cow and a class MooingGrassEater and a function, CowConsumer, that does the work. A classname is passed in and an instance of that class is checked with "implements" rather than "instanceof" to see if it uses the Cow interface. He points out a place where PHP itself uses something similar in user defined streams.

In the last article, I explained how to work with a couple of private properties that partially comprised the API of a basic class, which is useful for saving simple strings to a specified text file.

This part builds on this previous example but changes up the subclass (an instance of DataSaver) to use what they call an "accessor" - a function in the parent that returns the private variable/contstant's current value when called.

One of the most useful features that was introduced into the improved object model of PHP 5 is "member visibility." It provides PHP developers with the ability to specify the level of access each data member of a class will have in the context of a given application.

They review the other two keywords (public/protected) before venturing on to the use of "private" to protect, but allow access to, methods and properties in a parent class.

The wrapper is called PHPillow, lays on top of the Couch and offers even more comfort laying anything into the database. :) It has complete API documentation, currently a test coverage of >95%, tutorials and practical examples included. Even I would call it alpha - as CouchDB is still alpha at the current state - you can expect it stay quite stable API wise, as I rely heavily on it in other projects and therefore won't break too much.

You can check out the latest version of this wrapper from its subversion site and get more information about CouchDB on its website and wiki.

The previous concept can also be applied successfully when it comes to defining the visibility of properties and methods in PHP classes. [...] Using the jargon of object-oriented programming, this capacity is widely known as member visibility. This capacity allows PHP programmers to establish whether the set of methods and properties of a specific class will be public, protected, or private.

They start more generally by looking at how to set up the variables globally and then move down the line talking about restrictions (private/protected/public) and how to get to them in the scripts outside the class.

There is no official API that allows you to use the raw data. Nevertheless the data are sent to the Flash via XML so there is a chance to use them. For PHP Rasmus Lerdorf himself has implemented a class to access these data. The class allows to authenticate a user and fetch the running data of a user in a XML-Format

She gives an example of it in action - simple creation of an object then a call with the username and password. Behind the scenes, the data is pulled in and dropped into a SimpleXML object that includes total distance, total calories burned and data on the most recent run.