Why learn OOP in PHP – another take.

For people new to OOP and are comfortable with ‘classic’ procedural php, you may be wondering why should you even bother to learn object oriented concepts … why go through the trouble?

The PHP world:

PHP is moving in an OOP direction. For example, many important PHP extensions like PEAR and Smarty are OO based. So, to really understand and use these frameworks properly, you need to understand object oriented PHP.

The functional/practical advantages:

For smaller projects, using object oriented PHP may be overkill. That said, object oriented PHP really begins to shine as the project becomes more complex, and when you have more than one person doing the programming.

For example:

If you find that you have say 10-20 or more functions and you find that some of the functions are doing similar things … it is time to consider packaging things up into objects and using OOP.

OOP and your career as a programmer:

OOP is the modern way of software development and all the major languages (Java, PERL, PHP, C#, Ruby) use this method of programming. As a software developer/programmer, it only makes sense (in terms of career,) to keep your skills up-to-date.

Besides making you a more valuable PHP coder, understanding OOP in PHP will give you knowledge (OOP knowledge,) that you will be able to take with you into other languages.

… When you learn OOP in PHP, you’ll learn object oriented programming for any OO based language.

You will find with time that creating OOP based PHP projects, will just make your life as a programmer much easier. As an added bonus, soon you will develop your own collection of reusable objects, which you will be able to leverage in other projects.

Finally, You will also find that OOP based PHP is much easier to maintain and update.

OOP Challenges:

OO PHP does present some challenges when you first start out because you’ll need to learn to think about your PHP projects in a different way: you will need to conceptualise the project in terms of objects.

More details …

One common way of starting an object-oriented project is to start by drawing up simple diagrams of your objects. As you begin to work with object diagrams, you will find that they help make developing OOP based PHP projects much easier.

Here are a few tips about drawing object-diagrams:

· Use a paper and pencil
· Draw boxes to represent each object
· In those boxes, list your methods and your properties
· Use arrows and lines between boxes to denote relationships (parent – child) between objects.

So if you have been sitting on the fence waiting to jump into OO PHP, now is as good time as any to get started.

Stefan Mischook

www.killerphp.com
www.killersites.com

Hi,

I’ve just released a written tutorial on object oriented PHP, that targets people totally new to OO PHP.

Beginners Object Oriented PHP

Based on an article I wrote for a web design magazine; the tutorial is presented as a series of simple steps where I walk the reader through the process of building objects while at the same time, exposing them to basic object oriented concepts.

The first 11 steps (of 23) are up now.

-

This tutorial is actually the outline to a set of videos I will be producing in the near future … Just as soon as I am finished with my dental work.

… It hurts I tells you!

Thanks for reading,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com

Hi,

I’ve written up a short (2 pages,) document that goes over some of the very basics of object oriented programming - it should take you all of 5 minutes to read.

I wrote this as the preamble to my next video on object oriented PHP where we will actually create living breathing PHP objects.

Here’s a small snippet from the PDF:

How objects are created:

Step 1:

You create a class that ‘describes’ an object. Much in the same way a blueprint ‘describes’ a building. Instead of room dimensions etc … PHP classes / blueprints details a bunch of things about an object:

a. Variables it contains.
b. Functions it contains – yep, classes typically have functions in them.

Objects are much more powerful and complex when compared to functions. As such, there are many other special things that can be found in classes, which are unique to classes. Again, more on that later.

Step 2:

Once you’ve defined your class, you are ready to tell the PHP engine to actually create a class from your blueprint. There are special commands (PHP code,) that tell the PHP engine to create an object from the ‘blueprint’ you described/outlined in a class.

Step 3:

When the PHP script is run (with the code that instructs PHP to create an object … based on the class,) PHP actually creates a living, breathing object based on your class.

What I mean by ‘creates a living, breathing object, is to mean that the object is actually created in (server) memory.

Thanks for reading and watching.

Stefan Mischook

www.killerphp.com
www.killersites.com

I have a new article appearing in issue 125 of Web Designer Magazine – the November issue.

Article title:

Learn Object Oriented Programming (OOP) in PHP

Sample from the article:

With the release of php5, php programmers finally had the power to code with the ‘big boys’. Like Java and C#, php finally has a complete OOP infrastructure.

In this tutorial, you will be guided (step-by-step) through the process of building and working with objects using php’s built-in OOP capabilities.

At the same time you will learn:

• The difference between building a php application the old fashioned (procedural) way, versus the OOP way.
• What the basic OOP principles are, and how to use them in PHP.
• When you would want to use OOP in your PHP scripts.

People run into confusion when programming because of some lack of understanding of the basics. With this in mind, we are going to slowly go over key OOP principles while creating our own PHP objects. With this knowledge, you will be able to explore OOP further.

For this tutorial, you should understand a few PHP basics: functions, variables, conditionals and loops.

The article is broken down into 23 digestible steps with plenty of screen shots – makes it really easy to take in the information.

By the end of the article you will have your hands dirty with OOP PHP code … there is not better way to learn programming than to write code!

… I plan (at some point in the near future,) to put out a video tutorial to complement this article.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook