Is Object Oriented Design as Fast?

[guilfoyle]

Hi All,

I'm keen to teach myself how to use the object oriented aspects of PHP and have thought of building myself a contact/membership management application (yes another one!) as a project to learn through.

It occurs to me however that if I was to go the OO way, my .php files would be huge.

For instance, let's say I have some really basic objects such as a contact & member. The Contact class might have some basic gunctions like add_new, edit, find_show, email & delete. The Member class would be a subtype of this with the extra functions of take_out_new_membership & renew (at the very least).

Now I can imagine the code for those classed stretching to quite a few lines. And I'd have to include that code in each and every page that I do something with one of the Objects.

So what I'm getting at is, won't that slow down the processing of each page.

I imagine that there are a whole heap of other objects that I might also need that would also need to be included in pages (such as DBCOnnection say).

This probably sounds like a question out of the dark ages, I guess I'm wondering if the trade off you get with an OO approach (in a web scripting environment) is simplicity of design for performance. Is that correct or should I not worry about it?

Cheers, hope that makes sense!

Guil

[ahundiak]

There is a performance hit with using objects. But how much of a hit depends on many factors. There are a number of threads which have discussed this issue.

On my little soccer schedule site I have 27 class files (totaling 3,675 lines) which get loaded in on most pages. It's a bit extreme but performance is still acceptable.

IMHO, go with the object approach.