Thursday, 1 March 2007

Learn About the Flyweight Pattern with PHP 5

Alejandro Gervasio, in the first of a two part series, introduces the key concepts of the flyweight design pattern, and shows you how to apply them in the context of a form generator application. He says this pattern is easy to apply in the context of a given web application, and it offers functionality when it comes to preventing the unnecessary instantiation of different classes.

A flyweight can improve the web server’s overall performance, he explains. He gives hands on examples to facilitate better understanding. He further says that the practical examples used developed in PHP 5 but it can be modified to work with PHP4 as well.

He implements the flyweight classes with PHP under the following sections:

• Defining a target class
• Seeing the flyweight pattern in action