Developer.com takes a look today at some of the principles of PHP design patterns.

Although design patterns simply describe solutions to problems, they tend to emphasize solutions that promote reusability and flexibility. To achieve this, they manifest some key object-oriented design principles.

This article will cover

• Composition: How to use object aggregation to achieve greater flexibility than you could with inheritance alone
• Decoupling: How to reduce dependency between elements in a system
• The power of the interface: Patterns and polymorphism

With so much focus lately being on patterns (especially in the PHP community), it's good to have a basic introduction for those out there unsure what they are or how they can really help. They do a good job of showing how to use them as well, giving UML diagrams of each step of the way.