As an application developer, you can have a lifelong career without ever knowing what any of the patterns are called or how or when they're used. However, I've found that a good working knowledge of these patterns, as well as those introduced in the developerWorks article "Five common PHP design patterns" (see Resources), allows you to do two things: Enable high-bandwidth conversations and reduce painful lessons.

The patterns they talk about in this "five more" article of the series are:

• Adapter Pattern
• Iterator Pattern
• Decorator Pattern
• Delegate Pattern
• State Pattern

Diagrams are provided for each of them, showing how they flow along with brief code examples (structures really) to show how that transitions over to actual use.

Following on from the Simple Zend_Layout Example, Zend_Form is now in the trunk, so here's a super simple, complete example that shows it in action.

He includes screenshots of the different steps along the way - the form that will be generated, the structure of the directories and, of course, the contents of the PHP files to make things happen. He also mentions the use of Decorators (the design pattern) to assign the various attributes of the form element object.