Thursday, 15 March 2007

Article: Work with Strings and the Composite Pattern in PHP 5

Alejandro Gervasio, in the final article of a two part series, gives you information on the working with strings in the Composite pattern in PHP. He says, over the course of these tutorials, he demonstrates how this pattern works by setting up code samples, which will help understand the topic more clearly.

Alejandro Gervasio, in the first article of a two part series introduced you to the basic concepts of the composite pattern. He showed the foundations of the composite pattern, and also explained how it could be applied. He says, in the composite pattern, one object or a set of objects will behave similarly across an application, regardless of the context in which they were used.

In the final article he demonstrates how to use it to handle strings of data. He explains the practical concepts of the article in the following sections:

• Handling strings of data: He builds an abstract class. The class will define a generic model for creating some simple string processor objects.
• Defining the SingleStringProcessor and MultipleStringProcessor classes: to illustrate how the composite pattern can be applied using the abstract string processor class that you learned in the previous section. In this section he derives two subclasses from this base class.
• Putting all the classes to work together: he includes a testing script here. It shows accurately how the two string processor classes that were defined before can be used together to implement the composite pattern.