PHP Autoload classes without importing namespaces on top of every script - php

Question

Many developers writing object-oriented applications create one PHP
source file per class definition. One of the biggest annoyances is
having to write a long list of needed includes at the beginning of
each script (one for each class).
In PHP 5, this is no longer necessary. The spl_autoload_register()
function registers any number of autoloaders, enabling for classes and
interfaces to be automatically loaded if they are currently not
defined. Source: http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.autoload.php
Well i found that this statement is not true, because i still end up writing
long list of includes imports in each file simply because i am using different sub folders inside my includes folder and namespaces according to PHP-FIG's PSR-0 coding convention.
includes/core/database/
includes/core/html/
includes/domain/
etc.
spl_autoload_register() unable to automatically load DB, HTML Domain logic classes because it does not know folder structure where file is so i am using namespaces to it, but it takes just as much space as having imports on top of every script.
use MyProject\Core\Database;
use MyProject\Core\Html;
use MyProject\domain;
I use different classes per script so i cannot simply make one big file and include_once(), besides importing of namespaces does not work with include_once().
I instantiate class like this
try {
$DBQuery = new Database\DBQuery();
$HtmlGenerator = new Html\HtmlGenerator();
$domain = new domain\UserRegister();
} catch (Error $e) {
echo $e->getMessage();
}
My Autoload function
spl_autoload_register(function ($fullyQualifiedClassName) {
//change backslash in namespace name to DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR for file system
if ( stristr($fullyQualifiedClassName, "\\") ) {
$fullyQualifiedClassName = str_ireplace("\\", DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $fullyQualifiedClassName);
}
//function dirname() used because THIS file in sub folder /includes and we need to go to parent folder
$class_path = $lib_patch . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . "{$fullyQualifiedClassName}.php";
if ( !is_file($class_path) ) {
throw new Error("Unable to load class with path: $class_path");
}
require_once $class_path;
});
Any way i can avoid importing multiple namespaces at this i am open to stopping using namespaces completely but i'd like to keep my sub folder structure. Is there way auto-load function can know what folder my files at without making code that will loop trough every sub-folder looking for file e.g. DBQuery.php because this will impact performance.

Answer 1

Autoloading is saving you from includeing the files, you're now exclusively dealing with name resolution. If you don't want to write a bunch of use statement in your files, you could simply use the fully qualified names of those classes instead of aliasing them:
$db = new \MyProject\Core\Database;
$html = new \MyProject\Core\Html;
...
The use of use MyProject\Core\Database is that it enables you to write Database instead of \MyProject\Core\Database. Autoloading of the underlying file works the same.
If you even don't like that aspect, then it's hard to have your cake and eat it too. You could flatten your namespaces so you don't have as many different namespaces to import, but then your project organisation starts to become more prone to name clashes or harder to locate files. It's a tradeoff, something has to give somewhere. If you're not happy with some consequence of using namespaces, you need to find a new happy middleground for yourself.
Having said this, in many languages it is extremely common to have a bunch of import statements at the top of each file in one way or another. A decent IDE can largely auto-generate those while you write your code. It is something that you should rather get used to instead of fighting against it. It may be annoying, but the alternatives are more name clashes or giant imports. It's virtually impossible to have it modular, fast, extensible and terse all at the same time.