[Phpwm] OO?

[Iain Wallace]

Jono Bacon wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I was wondering - how much does anyone actually use the OO
> functionality that is in PHP, particularly PHP5. Although I have done
> OO stuff before in C++, I find myself largely writing fairly
> procedurally in PHP, and only really using OO when using PEAR.
> 
> What are your thoughts?
> 
>    Jono
> 
I think it can actually be very useful for dealing with data models that 
aren't necessarilly from a database. Obviously PHP has plenty of built 
in database functions (and even the mysqli class if you want) to deal 
with database access, so abstracting away a data access layer is pretty 
pointless a lot of the time.

An example of where I've created a data access class in PHP is a project 
I did last year as an interface for my TV tuner. I had a digital tuner 
on a windows box which you could set to record via the command line. I 
*could* have done all the scheduling and recording bits using countless 
seperate instances of exec(), but it's much nicer to have one interface 
class called Tuner and have Tuner->start_record() etc in it.

The scripts also took in TV listings to do the whole tivo-esque 
programme guessing thing, so having Programme(), Channel(), Schedule() 
etc instead of raw XML to have to manipulate made it much easier.

All the object-based web projects I've seen have had the tendency to be 
dog-slow, however. If one can do it easily without using objects the I'd 
go that route every time.

Cheers,
Iain

P.S. Isn't PHP5 actually object-based as opposed to object oriented? 
Unless I've completely failed to spot that it can actually handle 
polymorphism.