In a new post to his blog Lukas Smith proposes an idea for a loosely coupled interface setup that would allow for easier integration between third-party libraries and other applications.

Especially as for different libraries a different subset of the community could end up collaborating. Here I see 3 options: 1) each library bundles the interfaces (even though they sit in some common namespace), 2) each project asks their users to fetch the common interfaces from some other place 3) runtime "coupling". Option 3) doesn't exist today and is what this blog post is about.

He introduces the idea of a "spl_register_compatible_interface" method that would let you compare interfaces to see if they'd mesh. There'd still have to be a lot of communication between developers to make things match, though. He suggests three "practical issues" that libraries/tools would have to overcome to use a system like this - each framework has their own interface setup, the lead time for collaboration could be too much to be worthwhile, a lack of interest from some about collaboration and the idea of competing interface methods.

He's looking for feedback from the community on the idea(s) though, so go and leave a comment with your thoughts!