Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

Chris, you’re completely missing the point about objects and PHP.

Classes and inheritence are not new to PHP 5; PHP has had these for many many years now. PHP 5 brings with it new features, such as interfaces, class constants, and access controls (although it’s still got a ways to go to catch up with both Python and Ruby). It also changes the semantics of objects; in PHP 4, objects are passed by copy, but in PHP 5, objects are passed by handle.

You can - and plenty of folks do - write object-oriented code in PHP 4 just fine.

PHP’s runtime behaviour - that each page starts afresh - is one of PHP’s killer features. You’ve obviously got no idea about just what a difference it makes. Every time your script runs, you’re guaranteed to start with a clean slate. The only state you have to worry about is the state you’ve stored for yourself. This simplicity makes it almost trivial to create deterministic code, without which you cannot produce high-quality code.

Managing state between pages is very straight forward in PHP. If the state matters only for the user’s current visit, put it in the session. If you need state to persist between visits, or it is information that other visitors need, put it in a persistent datastore (such as a database). Use a local cache (files on disk, memcached) to reduce the amount of time you have to get state from the persistent datastore. That’s the PHP way.

Folks who follow design patterns religiously are missing the point. They’re not hard and fast rules (that way lies Java, and its hideous and pointless complexity); they’re guidelines, meant to make you think about the natural structures that arise in your code. They’re not meant to be a cult. Anyone tells you different, they haven’t read enough Suzuki. When all you have is a hammer (or a set of design patterns), everything starts to look like a nail.

And that’s the beauty of PHP over many of the other tools that you have. If you want to write a system that’s entirely object-oriented, you can. But you don’t have to. You can create and use objects where they make sense, and you can continue to use global functions where they make sense. PHP’s neutral philosophy gives you the freedom to just get on with it, and do what’s right for your needs, your skills, and your tastes.