Lorna Mitchell has posted three different ways you can use to get access to a namespaced class in a PHP 5.3 application, all useful depending on where you are in the application and your needs.

After what felt like years of debate over the notation to use for PHP's namespaces, it seems like the feature itself has had relatively little use or attention since it was actually implemented in PHP 5.3. We're all used to working without it but using it does make code neater.

Her three options are:

• Refer Namespace and Class Name
• Import the Namespace
• Alias the Namespace and/or Class

You can find out more about namespaces in PHP applications on the PHP manual.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted the next two parts of their series looking at using namespaces in PHP - parts 2 and 3:

In the second part of the series they build on the basics and look at importing namespaces into a script, aliasing them to a shorter, easier to use name and some rules to consider about name resolution.

The third part of the series (the last part) looks at the keywords the namespace functionality uses and how to autoload namespaced classes to keep their namespacing intact.

On Till Klampaeckel's blog this recent post shows you how to (quick and easy) set up multiple Magento stores on different domains with the same codebase.

Multiple stores is probably the killer feature of the Magento Commerce store. It enables the needy to manage multiple stores through a single interface. Your very own mall in a box. It's also a management/deployment nightmaredream come true. A single piece of software powering multiple websites.

He sets up his directory structure and shows how to alias certain directories to ones in the local document root so that the application will find things correctly. Drop in a custom index.php "bootstrap" file to run the application and you should be all set.

In response to this previous post, Ben Ramsey has relayed some of this thoughts on the benchmarks that were done by Jonathan Street comparing functions and their aliases:

Mmy first reaction was something like: "Egads! These benchmarks are stupid and misleading! These functions are simply aliases of each other. There should be no discernible difference, and any buffoon should realize this fallacy!" This was before I clicked through from PHPDeveloper.org to read his post.

After reading his data and going on to the Better Benchmarks post that followed it, he found that most of the results of additional testing came out negligible and that there was almost no difference between the two.

Ben illustrates the proof of this with a few lines pasted from the "ext/standard/basic_functions.c" in PHP's source showing that the code is shared via a PHP_FALIAS function call.