DevShed revisits its series on using design patterns in PHP applications with this new tutorial, a look at implementing the Factory pattern in PHP 5.

Summarizing, the factory pattern can be really useful when it comes to creating multiple objects that belong to the same family. In this three-part series I'm going to take a close look at it, and also demonstrate its remarkable functionality by showing you a decent variety of code samples, so you can start quickly including this pattern into your own PHP applications.

They lay the foundation by creating some basic factory classes for working with numeric and associative arrays. On top of this, they create the processing classes to create things like uppercase numeric arrays and lowercase associative arrays. Finally, they give examples of how to put it to use making several different sorts of arrays, including their output.