Earlier this month Rafael Dohms posted a new article to his blog looking at a feature of PHP it seems not every developer knows about – the Standard PHP Library (or SPL).

On the Blue Parabola blog, Matthew Turland has written about SPL (The Standard PHP Library), stating that it underrated, and wanting to make sure that it gets some more attention.

p. My buddy Julie Miller over at apress has come through for us again. Today you get a double bonus. You get to check out a sample chapter of “Pro PHP, Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and more” by Kevin McArthur. You also get a great tutorial on SPL!

As its name implies, the goal of the Standard PHP Library-or SPL, for short – is to provide a standard library of interfaces that allows developers to take full advantage of object-oriented programming in PHP 5. This library of interfaces creates a standard API for certain kinds of built-in functionality, allowing your classes to interact with the PHP engine in a much more seamless manner. The functionality it provides includes, for example, the ability to define how your objects will react when iterated over with foreach, advanced array access, file and directory access, and advanced SimpleXML object handling. The largest chunk of functionality that the SPL provides comes in the form of iterators.