In a new post to his blog Paul Jones talks about spotting something "in the wild" that he's a proponent of - a "universal constructor".

For those of you who don't know, "universal constructor" is the name I give to PHP constructors that always and only take a single parameter. The parameter is an array of key-value pairs, which is then merged with a set of default keys and values. Finally, the array is unmarshalled, usually into object properties.

He talks about the benefits of using a constructor like this in your applications and how he's implemented it as a standard part of the Solar framework. Oh, and the sighting in the wild? It was in this MongoDB session handler.

Be sure to check out the comments for some other great opinions on this "universal constructor" idea, both for and against.