The O'Reilly Network has a new posting in their PHP DevCenter section today concerning three-tier development with PHP 5.

This article will demonstrate the power of three-tier development in PHP 5, using PEAR::DB_DataObject for the business logic and Smarty for display logic. I assume that you have some familiarity with HTML, Smarty, PEAR::DB_DataObject, MySQL, and PHP 5. If you'd like to brush up on your knowledge, the following articles explain some of the theory:

• Simplify Business Logic with PHP DataObjects
• Introducing Smarty: A PHP Template Engine
• The PHP Scalability Myth

In these two pages they first combine Smarty and the PEAR:DB_DataObject to create a workspace to store the code. Then, they link this to the MySQL database and make a few template files to work with Smarty. Throw this all under a web server running PHP 5 and you'll have a simple, powerful development environment.