Easy Question - What Controls the Classes?

kebbelj

I'm making the jump from procedural to object-oriented programmer. I'm most of the way through ...

[INDENT]Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition by W. Jason Gilmore[/INDENT]

halfway through ...

[INDENT]PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra[/INDENT]

and am just beginning ...

[INDENT]PHP 5 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach by Lee Babin, Nathan A. Good, Frank M. Kromann, and Jon Stephens[/INDENT]

I'm getting a handle on building and using classes, but I'm unsure about what is supposed to load, organize, and manipulate the classes. Going back to Pascal, a programmer would write a main function that called all the program's other functions. I've assumed the same principle works here, and I've written [I]main.php[/I] files that load my classes, instantiate them, and then put them to work on their various activities. In other words, the core of my oop is a short procedural program. 

If this is the wrong approach, I would appreciate any book titles or web sites that discuss what belongs at the core of an oop. (If the answer to this question is in the books listed above, I just haven't gotten to it yet.)

laserlight

I've assumed the same principle works here, and I've written main.php files that load my classes, instantiate them, and then put them to work on their various activities. In other words, the core of my oop is a short procedural program.

Yes, though you do not have to run everything from a single main.php file. You can have your website formed by a collection of scripts that share the same core library of classes and pass information around to each other.

ahundiak

Ultimately you need at least one line of procedural code to kick things off. Its quite common to do something like this:

class Main
{
    static function run()
    {
        // Your application stuff
    }
}
Main::run();

laserlight

I think that that kind of code as in ahundiak's example is unnecessary. You could very well turn the static method into a free function, similiar to the global main() function in C and C++ that serve as an entry point. But PHP does not even need a global main() function, so why not just start the entry point code straight away?

ahundiak

I think it's a question of taste. Probably end up with other methods and perhaps a few instance variables inside of the Main class. The run method will probably create an instance of Main and then kick off the rest of the stuff.