On his blog today, Tobias Schlitt has his look at fluent interfaces, and it's place in the eZ components libraries.

The new buzz term "fluent interface" has been mentioned a lot in the PHP world recently, so I will not again explain, what a "fluent interface" is. Andi already mentioned, that this way of desining an API is quite good and can give you a really handy interface, but he also points out, that one should make very careful use of the technique.

Also I did not know the term "fluent interface" before, we realized, that we already used this in the eZ components, to be more exact, in our Database package, which gives you a quite good ammount of SQL abstraction.

He gives a brief example from their code, and explains how it works. The statement selects from a table "Person" where the age is greater than 15 and orders it by the "full_name" field, limit of 10 rows returned. With the "fluent interface" concept, that's pretty much how the statement "reads" as well...

On his blog today, Tobias Schlitt has his look at fluent interfaces, and it's place in the eZ components libraries.

The new buzz term "fluent interface" has been mentioned a lot in the PHP world recently, so I will not again explain, what a "fluent interface" is. Andi already mentioned, that this way of desining an API is quite good and can give you a really handy interface, but he also points out, that one should make very careful use of the technique.

Also I did not know the term "fluent interface" before, we realized, that we already used this in the eZ components, to be more exact, in our Database package, which gives you a quite good ammount of SQL abstraction.

He gives a brief example from their code, and explains how it works. The statement selects from a table "Person" where the age is greater than 15 and orders it by the "full_name" field, limit of 10 rows returned. With the "fluent interface" concept, that's pretty much how the statement "reads" as well...