The factory pattern using PHP

Many of the design patterns in the original Design Patterns book encourage loose coupling. To understand this concept, it's easiest to talk about a struggle that many developers go through in large systems. The problem occurs when you change one piece of code and watch as a cascade of breakage happens in other parts of the system -- parts you thought were completely unrelated.
The problem is tight coupling. Functions and classes in one part of the system rely too heavily on behaviors and structures in other functions and classes in other parts of the system. You need a set of patterns that lets these classes talk with each other, but you don't want to tie them together so heavily that they become interlocked.
In large systems, lots of code relies on a few key classes. Difficulties can arise when you need to change those classes. For example, suppose you have a User class that reads from a file. You want to change it to a different class that reads from the database, but all the code references the original class that reads from a file. This is where the factory pattern comes in handy.

The factory pattern is a class that has some methods that create objects for you. Instead of using new directly, you use the factory class to create objects. That way, if you want to change the types of objects created, you can change just the factory. All the code that uses the factory changes automatically.
Factory1.php shows an example of a factory class. The server side of the equation comes in two pieces: the database, and a set of PHP pages that let you add feeds, request the list of feeds, and get the article associated with a particular feed.

Factory1.php

<?php
interface IUser {
function getName();
}

class User implements IUser {
public function __construct( $id ) { }

public function getName() {
return "Jack";
}
}

class UserFactory {
public static function Create( $id ) {
return new User( $id );
}
}

$uo = UserFactory::Create( 1 );
echo( $uo->getName()."\n" );
?>

An interface called IUser defines what a user object should do. The implementation of IUser is called User, and a factory class called UserFactory creates IUser objects.