FW Editor: What are your plans or objectives in the near future?
Fabian Schmengler: Currently I am involved in planning out a larger web based project where I cannot talk about yet. I still try to open source some useful packages from time to time, so keep following my repositories on phpclasses.org and github. Also I hope to find time to go on with the spare time project "SlimGb", a lightweight, easy-to-install, easy-to-extend guestbook solution.

FW Editor: What was the first application you created?
Fabian Schmengler: After playing around a lot with BASIC on Commodore and later Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic on the PC as a child, I wrote my first real application when I was 17, a tool for schools that organizes company visits and tries to match wishes of the students. It was written in Delphi and at least sold two times :-)

FW Editor: How and when did you start writing the code for Output Filter? What inspired you the most?
Fabian Schmengler: Not that long ago in 2010, the whole process lasted no more than 2 weeks. I used Zend_View and similar Components a lot and was annoyed by the need to escape everything manually. So I thought it would be nice to have a wrapper that handled that and also could work on my domain objects.

FW Editor: Which are the most important features of Output Filter?
Fabian Schmengler: Well, that's pretty much straighforward: the wrapping of complex variables with a filtered object that has the same interface as the original object (or array) but returns everything filtered with a custom filter.

FW Editor: Which one is your favorite?
Fabian Schmengler: I like the little details, like that you can configure nearly every behaviour of the wrapper or combine multiple wrappers with different configurations.

FW Editor: Can you tell us more about this feature? Why it is so important? Is Output Filter the same without it?
Fabian Schmengler: The behaviour configuration lets Output Filter fit exactly to your needs. Imagine that you want to apply additional filters to certain attributes or methods, to leave certain variables unfiltered or to filter only getter Methods. All this can be configured at one place when initializing the wrapper and even easily reused across applications. It would definitely not be the same without. I found out that Symfony has a similar approach to output filtering but without the whole configuration and chaining possibilities. This is still great but gives no bonus points ;-)

FW Editor: How can you describe Output Filter in just a few words?
Fabian Schmengler: Ever forgot to escape your data while outputting? Let Output Filter take care of that for you!

FW Editor: Do you have any message for Output Filter users?
Fabian Schmengler: I hope this will be as useful to you like it is to me, don't hesitate to contact me if you have further suggestions!