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This is the original document from last year that this link references:

http://www.dzone.com/links/fluent_interfaces_in_php.html

I find it a bit odd. The code really depends on the formatting:

customer.newOrder()
    .with(6, "TAL")
    .with(5, "HPK").skippable()
    .with(3, "LGV")
    .priorityRush();

If that was all in one line, would it be obvious that skippable() applied only to (5, "HPK")? I don't think so.

I'd prefer with(5, skippable("HPK")) or something.

Also, you would never build a customer order object in this way in a real application. You would be looping through the user's input and adding each line-item to the order object, setting the skippable property if selected by the user.

I think it is admirable to try to find new and better ways of coding, but having to return 'this' from each method so you can string together chains of calls like this seems a bit strange. In C++ we do this type of thing with the << operator so we can chain stream output like "cout << "Fred is " << personType << "!" << endl;". I'm not sure it works as well in this 'Fluent Interfaces' example.

I think it can be powerful and make it obvious what the code is doing. As one small example, in Ruby on Rails you can say 2.weeks.ago and there are lots of little things like that built in. It's very cool.

"Also, you would never build a customer order object in this way in a real application."

You might be for automated tests.