Henri Bergius has a new post to his blog today about a tool that could help make code reuse across PHP applications a much simpler process. The Composer tool (and Packagist) make setting up packages and dependencies easy.

In PHP we've had a lousy culture of code-sharing. Because depending on code from others as been tricky, every major PHP application or framework has practically had to reimplement the whole world. Only some tools, like PHPUnit, have managed to break over this barrier and become de-facto standards across project boundaries. But for the rest: just write it yourself. But now Composer, and its repository counterpart Packagist, promise to change all that. And obviously new conventions like PHP's namespacing support and the PSR-0 standard autoloader help.

Making a package is as simple as setting up a JSON-based configuration file that names dependencies and package metadata (like name, type, etc). Composer generates an autoloader of its own to handle the loading of your needs based on the dependencies listed as a part of the package. If you'd like more information about Composer or to get the latest version and try it yourself, check out the project's github repository.