The next iteration of 5.4 looks like it’s more focused on cleaning up the language than features.

It appears many of the previously deprecated functions are now, as promised, removed completely. As this article is about features, here is a quick summary of the other changes:

• Removed: break/continue $var syntax
• Removed: register_globals, allow_call_time_pass_reference, and register_long_arrays ini options
• Removed: session_is_registered(), session_registered(), and session_unregister()

This information is based on alpha/beta releases and is subject to change.

Onwards to the new features…

Traits support

PHP 5.4 includes traits which allow reusable groups of methods to be used from any class.

Here is an example:

We can then use the above trait in an class using the use statement:

More information about traits can be found in the manual:

http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop...

Array dereferencing

As PHP has had object dereferencing for ages, this is something that is really long overdue and addresses the inconsistency between object and array return values.

A quick/common example of the existing object dereferencing:

Now we can do the same with arrays, without the current need to assign the array return value to a variable before we can access it’s contents:

This is a rather pointless example, but demonstrates the new functionality.

At my current day job, someone came up with this design pattern and has implemented it in almost every class throughout the entire application, there are probably close to 100 implementations of this “pattern”. I had to post it because it’s just so awesome!

Firstly let’s late a look at the traditional factory method, it’s usually a static method that instantiates 1 or more objects and returns you the object.

Simple and effective.

Behold! The tri-class factory method, 3 times more awesome than the normal factory method!

Firstly create your class as normal:

Then create a factory class, (you’re thinking, “what???”, but don’t think, just do):

Note, some very important features, you must have the public static $factory variable, and it must be initialised to null, despite this being the default behaviour of PHP. The methods also follow a very important structure too, but we’ll get to this in a moment.

Finally, the 3rd and final class, the “Factory Impl” class:

Then to put everything together we need to assign an instance of “Factory Impl” to the static $factory variable in the Factory class, this should be down outside of all the object structures, for added coolness:

Confused? You should be. But this is just the start of the awesomeness.

Next, you need to implement the factory methods, they should be implemented as normal public methods in the “Factory Impl” class, e.g.

For each method you create, you also need a static function to call this method in the factory class:

Repeat for all your factory methods, and you’re done!

I would recommend that to make it as helpful as possible for other developers, make sure you put everything in one file and try and call the file something different from any of the class names you’ve used, this will ensure that they will probably have to use a require_once each time they use it as it’ll confuse most autoloaders.

You should end up with something like this:

There is no denying the awesomeness of this pattern, 3 times more objects, 3 times more memory, 3 times bigger stack, 10 times more code, god knows how many times more inefficient, but infinitely more fun!

Next week, stay tuned for the “super god” class!

I have now published my Thumbshots plugin for WordPress which is available here.