Redeclaring classes or dropping class definitions?

[dcmbrown]

Does there happen to be any way of taking a currently defined class and dropping it's definition so that a it can be reincluded and redefined?

In our development process here we commonly use stubs to take the place of classes which are not yet complete or are in the process of being worked on. Unfortunately when we start using user sessions to view the site, the stubs get in the way of further development on the code.

I probably doubt it is possible to do something like:

uninclude('/path/to/some/stub/file.class.php');

and things like unset() only work on variables (as far as I have been able to discover). I would like to be able to do something similar to:

/ destroy previous class definition /
destroy_classdef('ClassName');
include_once('/path/to/some/non/stub/file.class.php');

Any chance there is a hack for doing something like this (rather than temporarily going through all of my code and redefining classnames)?

[AstroTeg]

I was looking into this for a socket server I was working on. I didn't want to interrupt or restart the socket just to reload code. I had found some code which almost worked, but it wasn't reliable for me (found it somewhere on php.net). Basically, I didn't have any luck. From the looks of it, PHP prefers to load the script and then cache it to memory until the script is done.