Programming PHP, 3rd Edition

Chapter 6. Objects

Object-oriented programming (OOP) opens the door to cleaner designs, easier maintenance, and greater code reuse. The proven value of OOP is such that few today would dare to introduce a language that wasn’t object-oriented. PHP supports many useful features of OOP, and this chapter shows you how to use them.

OOP acknowledges the fundamental connection between data and the code that works on that data, and it lets you design and implement programs around that connection. For example, a bulletin-board system usually keeps track of many users. In a procedural programming language, each user would be a data structure, and there would probably be a set of functions that work with users’ data structures (create the new users, get their information, etc.). In an object-oriented programming language, each user would be an object—a data structure with attached code. The data and the code are still there, but they’re treated as an inseparable unit.

In this hypothetical bulletin-board design, objects can represent not just users, but also messages and threads. A user object has a username and password for that user, and code to identify all the messages by that author. A message object knows which thread it belongs to and has code to post a new message, reply to an existing message, and display messages. A thread object is a collection of message objects, and it has code to display a thread index. This is only one way of dividing the necessary functionality into objects, though. ...