Thomas Weinart: What Iterators Can Do For You

Thomas Weinert has a new post to his site showing some of the things that iterators can do for you (including working with arrays and aggregation).

Basically Iterators provide a list interface for an object. Like all interfaces they are a contract how something can be used. If you use an interface it is not relevant how it is implemented - the implementation logic is encapsulated. It is of course relevant on the integration level. A bad implementation can impact the performance of you application. Even an good implementation may need special resources (like a database). But all this does not impact how you use it. Your code using the object with the Iterator interface stays the same.

He shows how to use the IteratorAggregate, ArrayIterator, FilterIterator and how to create a custom Iterator that you can extend in your own code.