When is using OOP best?

[jeofoyster]

Hey all - here's a general question.

When is it best to use a class? What are the criteria for using OOP over, say, a series of includes with functions and such? This may be a general opinion question or maybe there's a standard? Any good articles on the applicatio of OOP out there?

Jeof

[sarahk]

There will be more articles on oop than you will believe possible. Don't be fooled that you have to only look at PHP OOP. The theory stands for all languages. It's only the implementation that changes. Start with http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/luis20000420.php3

Then consider the hacks reason to use classes which has little to do with oop.
If you have some code which is quite complex, there are alot of if's and variable passing - you don't want to have global variables and need to keep it all quite distinct.

That's a great time to use a class, the object can store it's own variables as properties (as well as having others local to the methods), it controls it's own methods and these can be called from another script in simple chunks.

Sure you could include a bunch of functions and they could call each other but you wouldn't have the data security. This way you can dramatically cut down on the variable passing and only pass those things which need to be passed.