classes, when and where

[many_pets]

This is a general question about the philosophy of using classes and objects.

I come from a background of Fortran, and am now coding in php, and learning OOP. I have a mySQL member db and I have created a class for members (having id, name, address, etc). Using the class is straightforward for individual members.

Here's the question: If I want to deal with many members at a time, such as listing many of them, should I take each member and create an object , then print the object? Or, take each member and create an array of objects (can I do this?) and then print them all? Or, just skip the objects and just print straight from the mySQL query results?

What's the overhead of creating an object for each one? Worth it if I can reuse code? Is there ever a point where you skip using the object?

Thanks for any ideas and input...

[Weedpacket]

Whether to use object-oriented programming versus procedural programming is half the time a religious matter.

Threads where this has been discussed include
http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10236485
http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10207440

For your case it depends on which one will be the more maintainable in the future; and that depends on what you're going to be using the results for.