Derick Rethans phar. More specifically, he tried it out on the eZ Components framework, trying to make a complete release package.

A phar is to PHP what a jar is to Java. I spent a little time to see how easy it would be to make our latest eZ Components release into a workable phar.

He includes the few lines of code to make a package (four in his case) and a one-liner on how to use it in your application. Building the package is as easy as running a PHP command line call.

Others in the community have picked up on Derick's post and have checked into phar themselves - Sebastian Bergmann and Stuart Herbert (on benchmarking phar).