Coding libraries with OOP PHP - Advice Needed!

[allididntwantto]

I'm coding a bunch of libraries in PHP to handle common stuff in the systems I create i.e. DB access, cookies, caching, sessions, authentication, encryption etc. I'm doing it all in OOP both so I can improve my knowledge of OOP and also so I can have some nicely structured classes.

Here's where I need advice... there will be a script named general.lib.php that will be included at the top of every main script. general.lib.php will include all the other library files. What is the best way of doing this so that all the libraries can utilise each other? e.g. so the cookie class can create encrypted cookies by accessing methods of the encryption class.

TIA for your advice people!

Simon Plenderleith

[ahundiak]

I'd suggest spending some time exploring the PEAR classes (pear.php.net) to get some ideas on how to make different libraries play nice together.

Having a master include statement is generally not such a good idea since unused libraries will be pulled in. Instead, your cookie library could have a :
require_once("encryption.lib.php');
whenever it needed to process encrypted cookies.