referencing class definitions in java style, is it possible with php?

[khayll]

Hi All,

When working with many classes in a php code, some classes might have the sam name, in java you can reference classes in different folders by writing foldername.classname, while referencing the classes in current folder with just classname. Is there a way to do the same or something like this in php?

Thank you!
Khayll

[laserlight]

As far as I know, PHP still doesnt have any package/namespace mechanism.

[thorpe]

Its easy enough to create your own method of achieving this.

Say you have a file structure like.

libs
  db
    mysql.class.php
    postgres.class.php
  io
    template.class.php

Where mysql.class.php contained a class called mysql. You could call it using a functiion like....

function __autoload($class) {
  $tmp = 'libs/'.str_replace('_','/',$class).'.class.php';
  require_once $tmp;
}

$mysql = new db_mysql();

Might need some tweaking, but you get the idea.

edit😛S, I think __autoload might be php5 only but..... you could get away wiithout it. Just write a wrapper around require_once to clean the include path for you.

[khayll]

Well thanks for the suggestion, my problem is though that I have may list.class.php and details.class.php files. They are in different fodelrs, and I usually dont use two of them during one execution, but what if I would like to...

Imagine a web application, which has a voting engine, and a forum, and both have a list class in different folders. It works fine, until I try to display bot on one page. Then I have two list classes defined, which gives an error...

This is a big problem, since when different people are trying to write modules for a code, that both have list and details classes, then the list classes of the modules cannot be both parsed in one script.

When making a large web application this can really be a problem.

Any suggestion?

Thanks,
Khayll

[khayll]

And as far as I know php 4 cannot parse this:

class $foldername$cassName {
}

which might be a solution...

And I am pretty sure php 5 could not parse it either...

[thorpe]

Yeah... I see your problem now, not sure of the solution.

$foldername = 'foo';
$cass = 'bar';
class $foldername.$cass.'Name' {
}

Could be parsed (i think - at work cant test it).... does that help? Whats your idea?

[Weedpacket]

Playing Wet Blanket here, I feel forced to point out that the Zend Framework has (for example) a file

Zend/Pdf/Element/Reference/Context.php

that defines a class

Zend_Pdf_Element_Reference_Context

. No, really; that's how it's declared in the file and you are expected to go

$context = new Zend_Pdf_Element_Reference_Context($parser,$table);

Which doesn't bode well for an elegant solution to your problem 🙁