Gonzalo Ayuso has posted his real-life example of closures in a PHP 5.3 application rather than some of the syntax-only based examples from several other sites around the web.

One of the new improvements in new PHP5.3 version are the Closures. Here you are a real-life example where closures are really useful for me.

His example shows how to work with a nested array of data from a SQL query and walk through it using the array_walk function and a closure as a call back. Using the "use" keyword allows it to pull in values from outside the closure's scope and process the quantity, amount and price values to calculate totals.

In this recent post to his blog Keith Casey looks at applying the Joel Test to an open source project he contributes largely to, web2project.

In the last few months or so, it appears the PHP Community has finally found the Joel Test. Lorna Jane spoke about it last month at PHPNW 09 and this week Brandon Savage adapted it for web development. While I'd love to point out the fact that I've been writing about the Joel Test for years and even have the "Joel On Software" book on the required reading list for Blue Parabola staff... but I digress...

Keith looks at the different parts of the test - from making shippable software to good unit tests to creating a good build process - and compares them to the current state of web2project. He mainly focuses on the question of "Can you make a shippable version of your software in one step?"