On DevShed today there's the start of a new series looking at design patterns in PHP applications. In this first part of the series, they look at lazy and eager loading.

In the case of PHP 5, which is better suited for developing web-based programs, there are two complementary design patterns that can be of great help in building faster and more reliable applications. Of course, as this article's title suggests, I'm talking about the lazy and eager loading patterns. Despite their rather funny names, they are pretty easy to implement in PHP 5-controlled environments.

To illustrate, they've created a sample class that uses a few class properties and a __toString method to return the values.

Stefan Esser has released a new update (really two, but one is the latest) to his Suhosin patch for PHP - version 0.9.27.

The previous update (0.9.26) updated the utility with an improved randomness fixing a few issues with an ini setting and the uploadprogress extension as well as adding in a few new settings and updates to the randomizing functions that come included in PHP.

The 0.9.27 update (the most current) updates the patch with a lazy loading change that allows it to work correctly on systems that have it disabled by default (causing the previous patch to not work).

You can grab this latest release, 0.9.27, from the suhosin website.

Recently, Cormac posted this look at a method for lazy loading on variables in an object with the magic __get method.

I used the magic method __get() to load the images into the [Product] object when they were needed. __get() is called whenever something tries to access a variable that is not set or publically accessible, so basically I used that to load the images whenever some other piece of code tried to access Product::images.

He includes a quick bit of code that fires off an internal private method for the class that loads up the images. In his example, if they're already loaded, it never gets called.