An ideal implementation would look something like this:

$configuration = array(
    'foo' => 123,
    'bar' => true
);

$one = new Thing;
$one->configure($configuration);

$two = new Thing;
$two->configure($configuration);

Panda_Configurable_Interface offers a standardized solution: Simply implement the interface and add a configure() method to your class.

A Quick Example

The interface has a single requirement: the configure() method:

public function configure(array $configuration = array());

As you can see, your implementation will need to accept an array as its only parameter. The idea is that the configuration array would contain name and value pairs representing configuration directives (although it could really contain anything) for your class.

Here’s an example from the recently updated Panda_Loader_Abstract class:

public function configure(array $configuration = array())
{
    if (array_key_exists('namespace', $configuration)) {
        $this->setNamespace($configuration['namespace']);
    }

    if (array_key_exists('baseDir', $configuration)) {
        $this->setBaseDir($configuration['baseDir']);
    }

    if (array_key_exists('load', $configuration)) {
        if (is_string($configuration['load'])) {
            $this->load($configuration['load']);
        }
        elseif (is_array($configuration['load'])) {
            foreach ($configuration['load'] as $className) {
                $this->load($className);
            }
        }
    }
}

And on the front, it looks like this:

$Loader = My_Loader::singleton();
$Loader->configure(array(
	'baseDir' => realpath('../lib'),
	'namespace' => 'Blog',
	'load' => array(
		'FrontController',
		'Request',
		'Route',
		'Controller',
		'Model',
		'View'
	)
));

Implementing this component in your code is useful only when one style of code organization is used — fortunately, this is the case for most projects. The autoloader simply wraps the existing load() method — but calls it from an instance returned from a static singleton() call.

When bootstrapping your project, simply register the autoload() method and you never have to worry about including dependencies again.

spl_autoload_register(array('Panda_Loader_Singleton', 'autoload'));

Check it out yourself: http://code.google.com/p/panda-php/source/browse/trunk/Panda/Loader/Singleton.php

In summary, Panda_View is a simple package which provides an API for rendering data across various output formats. At the time of this writing, Panda_View can render PHP, JSON, XML, and HTML. New new classes for rendering data is trivial — in most cases, all that needs to be done is write a render() in a class which extends Panda_View_Abstract.

More info:

• I have started a wiki page for the Panda_View package
• API documentation is available for all libraries:
  • Panda_View_Interface
  • Panda_View_Abstract
  • Panda_View_PHP
  • Panda_View_JSON
  • Panda_View_XML
  • Panda_View_HTML

This leaves the option available to put other projects at the SVN root which are closely related to the Panda project. For example, I have been considering releasing a product with every major release of Panda. So 1.0 could get a blog, 2.0 could be a shopping cart, etc. Each project would get their own directory at the root of the trunk which would also act as that project’s namespace.

This also makes including Panda source less error prone. For example, if I were to say:

require 'View/HTML.php';

What library did that just come from? Was View a PEAR package or was it a Panda package? The problem is that the above require statement is too ambiguous. Granted, the chance that multiple View libraries in one project would be rare, but it’s never a good idea to assume that.

Panda libraries should be store in a Panda directory and your require statements should also reflect that:

require 'Panda/View/HTML.php';

There. Much better.

As always, an interface and an abstract class is provided but several concrete classes are provided. They are:

• Panda_View_Interface
• Panda_View_Abstract
• Panda_View_PHP
• Panda_View_JSON
• Panda_View_XML
• Panda_View_HTML

More info:

• There is a page in the wiki that gives a quick overview of how the library is used.
• API documentation is available for Panda_Loader_Interface and Panda_Loader_Abstract