building big php applications -> structure problem

mlewczuk

Hello,
I'm wondering about one thing, what will be the best solution for building big php applications:

All code is in one file
And if we want to load only some part of this code, we use IF statement. For example, I want to go for "news section", so the url will be like this: www.someurl.com/index.php?section=news, and in our index.php we have somethink like this: if ($section == "news") { news content } else if ($section == "old_news") { .. }.

Code is splited for many small files
When we have 100 sections, our code will be splited for 100 files, then if we would like to go to news section we will write this url: www.someurl.com/news.php

And my question is what is the best ?? What will be faster and better in developing etc... I have read few articles about that, and there is no simple answer about this. It's realy important if you make big application, where there are many pages, many functions, classes etc...

I'm waiting for your's opinions.

Weedpacket

Almost certainly multiple small files. Large applications don't get written as one big C file, and large web sites aren't one big file either.

Plus it saves on mod_rewrite rules needed to make page URLs look sensible.

planetsim

well with step 2 you still can have your url's index.php?page=blah by using switch statements...

like this

switch($_GET['page'])

case book:
include("book.php");
break;
// etc etc for all other links

default:
include("defualt);
break;

now with this if we dont have page= a blank or no page to equal anything than our defualt will get used. Now this is a kinda good approach if a visitor has a wrong url or something.

Now i hope that helps you...

Oh and yes, try to keep files as small as possible, the smallest your code can be for huge applications as well as graphics the better upload time....

Weedpacket

Originally posted by planetsim
Oh and yes, try to keep files as small as possible, the smallest your code can be for huge applications as well as graphics the better upload time....

Oh yes, and not just on the client either; smaller files mean they load into PHP faster, and compiled faster too. Having more files does mean the filesystem has to do a bit of work, but it only becomes an issue on busy servers and 100s of pages - and it would still be faster than loading the entire thing into memory as a single file.