OO or not OO ?

stuartc1

Its probably been said a million time before but anyway:

Can anyone state any really good reasons for using Classes in PHP and not just use functions etc?

answers like - 'causes its cool' and 'because people like java and it kakes me look smart' don't count.

I would so much like to be convinced Classes an PHP are a must ?
:p

Weedpacket

How about:
"You've got a whole pile of closely-related functions that work on similar kinds of data, and they all go around calling each other - quite incestuous really - and they all need either lots of arguments or lots of globals or pass big fancy array structures to carry all the data they're communicating to each other".

Plus it helps keep your namespace clean.

malbera

if you make a counter script, there are not a must
but in many cases is good to use oo. anyway, it helps a lot
😉

tomhath

I don't think OO is a must; it's a tool.

Most php scripts are pretty small so the benefits of OO are not that great. It does help when you have larger programs and need to keep various data structures and what can be done to the data organized and modularized. It reduces the chance that a change to a data structure or function will have undesirable side effects.

stuartc1

still not convinced.

PHP is not fully OO anyway, many of the basic concepts are there, but in practice is not that great, a bit slow, uses more memory etc. And everything you need to do can always be done using other methods.

a really good example may help.😃

WebHorn

When it's a big project that I have a lot of time to plan for in advance, I prefer to code it OO when possible. For me, using OO helps me enforce strict code/content separation because I am able to separate the two very distinctly in my mind. I've found myself tempted many times to "just drop this one-off function on the bottom of the page" using functions only...OO helps me plan good code structures by forcing me to think ahead to the big picture and plan my methods accordingly.

For one-off scripts, "whatever" scripts, and "oh-my-gawd-the-boss-is-breathing-down-my-neck-gotta-have-it-yesterday" scripts, it's still easier to use if(action == "foo") and functions to churn stuff out quickly.

Bottom line - if you code how you are comfortable, and your code gets the job done, you're doing what needs to be done.

jayant

OO is helpful mostly when you are building 2 seperate things and you need to combine those at some later stage.

OO or no OO is simply
C++ or C

stuartc1

Does OO Classes run faster that non-OO ?
I remember reading that it can criple the Server on heavy loads in comparison to using basic code scripting (then non-OO way).😕

WebHorn

I have a fully OO templating engine running on our corporate intranet w/ an Oracle 8 backend that serves over 400 people daily. We get ~50,000 hits/day on the Intranet and the sever doesn't blink. That's small fries compared to lots of sites but it gets the job done here.