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I have been using regular PHP for some time now. My formal code training is zero. Whatever I've learned I've found here, on the PHP documentation site, the MySQL documentation, etc.
I write PHP from scratch. I use functions for tasks that re-occur, I apply MVC to write more maintainable code, and I recently wrote a nice little library with some of my functions so I can save time in future projects. Long story short, without being some sort of guru, I have a decent relationship with PHP, and so far it seems to get things done for me.
So my questions are the following: Why should I start writing object-oriented code in PHP? How will it make my programming life better and why is it better than the traditional way of doing things?
OOP was made to make programming languages more similar to real life.
What does that mean?
We live in a world of objects. You are an object (Person), you live in an object House, that House object (as well as any other House object) has an House::$address and House::$number, your house probably contains other objects such as LivingRoom and Kitchen. The Kitchen can hold Oven and Stove and Refrigerator, which are all extensions of the KitchenAppliance object.
OOP programming takes that approach, and incorporates it into the programming world.
How does it help me?
Well, there are several things:
It makes your code more maintainable. Instead of dividing your program into tasks (functions), you divide it into objects, if you think of a database connection as an object (meaning, there can be multiple database connections, they share methods and properties, but each is preformed on a different instance), it makes it easier to understand and maintain.
It makes your code more readable. You define an object with the class decleration, and then call it with the new ClassName() keyword.
It allows for extensibility and flexibility. Just like KitchenAppliance can be extended into Oven or Stove, so can your objects and classes.
Summary
OOP programming comes with many advantages. It requires a slightly different way of thinking, but eventually, it's worth it.
You have received a lot of comprehensive answers, so I will use one argument: design patterns. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern).
You can find tones of solutions for commons problem, which can save your time and improve quality of your code.
Some design patterns examples:
Strategy pattern (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_pattern) - for using different alghoritms/solutions in class without changing it
Observer pattern (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_pattern) - you can invoke different actions (and register them during execution) - when state of object changes.
Decorator pattern (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decorator_pattern) - you can extend your object dynamically, and use new objects in same manner as old.
Franky speaking, if you want to better understand OOP, you have to:
Learn or understand common design pattern.
Start using unit testing, you will find out that lack of dependency injection can be real pain in bad architecture.
learn and understand OOP principles, like SOLID http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID_%28object-oriented_design%29.
Without this you will be using functions encapsulated in classess, like in namespace, not OOP.
For sure you can write your code without OOP and try to implement designs/patterns like MVC without using just a single object.
I don't want to answer why to program in OOP. This you could read in e.g. on this Stack Overflow question.
I think you want to know, when and why you would fail with your coding behavior:
This would be at the moment when you try to work with another person together. The other programmer would never find your code readable. He will take a long time till he understands how your software works.
I think it's hard to separate tasks in your code for teamwork. How are your files separated, and how is the naming convention? You have to solve this by your own and don't reuse every known pattern.
What are you doing with third-party stuff? How do you integrate them? I do not know any usable library without using an OOP schema...
There are many more problems which are surely possible to solve, but every time you lose the possibility for others to understand your code and to reuse it in other programs...
One word: cohesion.
When you start developing software using objects (especially when those objects use Dependency Injection), you find that common functionality starts to gravitate into their own specialised classes that are reused. This makes maintaining and enhancing the software MUCH easier, and results in higher quality software.
Example:
Many applications use sessions, for storing all sorts of stuff. When all session data is managed by a specialised session manager class, all the code that is responsible for dealing with the session is kept in one place. If you want to change the way you application uses session data (perhaps to make it more secure, or more efficient), you only need to change code in one place.
I made the jump to OOP PHP three months ago and it is one of the best things I have done.
I started off with PHP Object-Orientated Solutions and have just finished Real-world Solutions for Developing High-quality PHP Frameworks and Applications. Both of those books have helped me a lot, and I highly recommend them.
The learning curve is quite high. But I guarantee, you will be glad you've turned to OOP.
With OO you can develop applications a lot faster and in a cleaner way. You could easy to reuse your extisting classes with extending them (reducing your code base).
With OO design you only have to deal with small pieces of codes at any one time, not a bunch a functions in a file with 3000+ lines of code. You should also look after the
SOLID guidelines.
I was asked to do a project in PHP and to make sure it was object oriented. I've done OO and I've done PHP, but never both.
The main benefit of OO PHP (outside of inheritance/polymorphism) seems to be code organization. That's fine; I'm doing that. But where I get stuck is if I should actually be creating instances for every "object."
To me (and maybe I'm being naive here), a web app is all about making very short, stateless requests to alter or retrieve records in a database. The objects can't persist between requests. So it feels rather pointless to load data from the database, construct an object from that data, make a small update, save the data from the object back to the database, and then throw the object away. The loading/saving code seems to be a lot of work for nothing. [clarification: a waste of development time, not processing time... not too concerned about overhead]
The alternative is to have a bunch of singletons (or classes with static methods) that just provide a nice, organized abstraction layer to the database layer. I guess writing code in this manner just doesn't feel truly OO. Am I missing something or is that style fine?
Yes, you could summarise the benefits of OO as "code organization"; but this is true for all languages (not just PHP). In reality, it's more than that; it's about how you think about your data structures and algorithms, i.e. about how they map to concepts in the problem domain, how they relate to one another (ownership, parent-child, polymorphism, etc.), and how they expose clean, consistent interfaces to one another (encapsulation). If these concepts would benefit your application, and outweigh the extra development time vs. a quick-and-hacky procedural solution, then go for it.
I don't think persistence has anything to do with it.
I think you should question why you've been asked "to make sure it was OO". This seems like a pretty arbitrary request without further justification. Normally, the approach should be to write your application in the style that best suits the requirements, not arbitrary whims...
Singletons are essentially just global variables with some namespace sugar added in. There are a few main benefits to programming with objects and classes that you just don't get from straight procedural programming. One is inheritance, as you mentioned. Another is the namespacing - you can have a code to compress the lot into a single include file (more meaningful in interpreted languages like PHP than in compiled languages).
Objects are essentially a collection of functions with a shared state (though singletons make that a global state. Beware.) As you pointed out the benefit is mostly that that state is transparently shared by the functions without needing to explicitly pass it every single call. If you have various functions per request operating on shared data and wish them to be specialized forms of a general set of functions, OOP is probably a good fit.
Since you have been tasked to "make sure it is object oriented", I'd take some time to consider common groups of functions, generalizations of same, etc.
In the end the setup/teardown time of the objects isn't too bad - and it might even save some development time in the future if you do a good job.
I think OOP is just a programming style and has nothing to do with developing an application. What you need is a pattern that provides a sufficient abstraction layer (for example: MVC).
My recommendation is: Fat-Free.
It's tiny, simple and quickly take you to the minimal viable version of your product. It has everything that you might need (Caching, ORM, CRUD, Captcha...) and is so flexible that you can use any pattern and with your custom directories hierarchy.
Check out the extensive documentation. The only issue is that it requires PHP 5.3. I think it's reasonable considering the options and flexibility it offers. It really changes the way you work; you should definitively give it a shot.
Like most things in life answer is somewhere in a middle.
Todays application use ORMs (for example doctrine for php) for different kind of optimization, better understanding of database approach (which is important for larger dev teams), easier update of the code, abbstraction layer that is well known to people who join the project, caching mechanisms,....
Classes with static methods are just fine if you are doing some smaller project on your own, but when more people are involved in progress you simply need something more robust and standardized.
I'm fairly new to OOP in PHP, I've made a couple of basic scripts but nothing impressive. All I've really taken from it is that it would probably be easier just make a collection of functions and include them.
The structure of classes seems to just confuse what was otherwise a simple process. And in collating everything into a class it doesn't really add any functionality.
So I'm clearly missing something. Could someone explain what functionality is added by creating classes
Classes are a notion of object-oriented design (and programming and analysis, respectively), where they are used to encapsulate data and methods.
Other object-oriented programming techniques may include features such as
information hiding,
data abstraction,
encapsulation,
modularity,
polymorphism and
inheritance
From an article .. top-15-best-practices-for-writing-super-readable-code:
Object oriented programming can help you create well structured code. But that does not mean you need to abandon procedural programming completely. Actually creating a mix of both styles can be good.
From http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/concepts/class.html:
In the real world, you'll often find many individual objects all of the same kind. There may be thousands of other bicycles in existence, all of the same make and model. Each bicycle was built from the same set of blueprints and therefore contains the same components. In object-oriented terms, we say that your bicycle is an instance of the class of objects known as bicycles. A class is the blueprint from which individual objects are created.
Finally, a short youtube video about the differences between the procedural and object-oriented programming paradigm ...
While it may at first look simpler to just use a set of functions and include them, classes have their strong points. Classes can store variables and those variables are there "later."
Here's an edited example from php.net
<?php
$item_name = 'Widget 22';
$item_price = 4.90;
$item_qty = 2;
$item_total = ($item_price * $item_qty);
echo "You ordered $item_qty $item_name # \$$item_price for a total of: \$$item_total.";
?>
v.s:
<?php
class Item {
protected $name, $price, $qty, $total;
function __construct($name, $price) {
$this->name = $name;
$this->price = $price;
}
function calculate($qty) {
$this->total = number_format(($this->price * $qty), 2);
}
public function __toString() {
return "You ordered ($this->qty) '$this->name'" . ($this->qty == 1 ? "" : "s") .
" at \$$this->price, for a total of: \$$this->total.";
}
}
$widget22 = new Item("Widget 22", 4.90);
$widget22->calculate(2);
echo $widget22;
?>
Another huge benefit is that you can make more of them. Say you want to calculate the price of another item and print it. Instead of having to duplicate all the fancy logic, you can just call new Item and be done.
A big advantage to OOP is code reuse. An example: Say you design a generic "Socket" class, which communicates with a server at a very low level. Then, I may come along and decide that I want to write an FTP class, which allows a user to download files while connected to an FTP server. I can "subclass" your Socket class and extend its functionality to support FTP, without rewriting your code.
Now, say John wants to write an HTTP class, to interact with HTTP servers. He, too, can subclass your Socket class to accomplish this, without rewriting the low level socket code.
Notice how in this example there was no duplication of socket code; both me and John shared it. Code duplication is bad because if there is an error in the duplicated code, the exact same bug may occur somewhere else in your code and you may not realize it.
More detailed information about classes can be found on Wikipedia.
Classes are a way to organize programs. Classes can be used to represent entities in the real world, or artifacts in our programming world, reducing the complexity of programs by allowing us to reason about them in terms of a higher granularity.
It is well-known in psychology that experts organize knowledge into "chunks" to allow them to reason more easily and quickly about their domain. Classes allow us to reason more easily and quickly about our programs.
In addition, classes allow us to group together the knowledge about an entity together with the methods/procedures/functions/operations that are naturally associated with that entity. Again, this provides a natural way to organize the information in our programs.
There are other advantages of classes, such as inheritance, but primarily classes are a cognitive way of organizing program structure to reduce the complexity.
Just a coupl months back I was posting similar questions about classes, I have been using PHP for a few years now and I really didn't see a need to use classes, they just complicated a simple process like you said, well I finally decided to jump in on the Class train and I am still learning but I am comfortable using them now and WOW I have a completely opposite way of thinking about them now, I think they are the best feature in PHP now!
I will admit they can be overkill for a small application but a large social network site like mine is far from small, it has hundreds of files and now that I am converting over to classes it is structured much better now and easiar to build, update, manage my code and other users could come in and understand my whole site a lot better now that it uses classes. Another great feature is you can break up all those functions you might have into seperate class files and use autoload() function to auto load the correct file only when the class is needed, this is great on a big project too. Classes make things more plug in play.
All I can say is it's kind of one of those things you need to dive into to see the REAL benefits of it.
I have thought exactly the same thing.
I have read a few books on OO-PHP, my favorite being PHP In Action.
Although when I read the books I thought "Hey, this is very useful and interesting information.", I have yet to use a significant amount of OO-PHP.
Simple needs like getting info from the server and JSON-ing it back really dont need OOP. Im sure it is "Best Practice", but for many people's needs it isn't practical. A few classes, like database connection, and similar data handling can be real time savers, but PHP is sometimes easier and quicker to be used only partially OO.
It would definitely be easy to code in procedural programming (that's what your simple process is called) if your website is small. But as your website grow, you will definitely need to sort things.
For example, you will need classes to act as templates for entities to the database. You might need classes to represent each page, and in a single file you might create multiple pages. Thus these are all advantages of OOP.
In another example you have like 40 over functions. You would want to group them together. Putting them in a class as static methods would definitely help. It'll clean things up so that in future when you come back to the same code, everything looks familiar to you.
I always thought the same thing until I started using classes--realizing that it is so much simpler and better.
You should create those functions that you're mentioning, but gather them all within a class. The functions can then within a class share the same variables, and therefore making it simpler when having to use the same functions multiple times.
The best example I can come up with now is connecting to a database.
Instead of having individual functions that connect, sends a query, fetching the results and closing the connection you could wrap all these functions within a class. This would allow you to communicate to the database multiple times using the same functions, without having to make loads of variables tailored for the specific use on the page.
If you're just writing procedural-style functions then slapping them together into a class you're not going to get many of the benefits of OOP. I think that the Open Closed Principle and the Dependency Inversion Principle describe some of the biggest benefits of OOP, which you wont get unless you intentionally design them into your code.
OOP isn't perfectly suited to everything, though. I think procedural programming is well suited to web development. It involves converting a (fairly) simple request into a bunch of HTML, which is a highly procedural task. If it's simpler to include a few functions, there's no point trying to shove an OOP shaped block into a procedurally shaped hole. However, I imagine that OOP would be the better option if the website was very complex.
All of the above poster have really good points. I would highly recommend the following books:
The OO Thought Process: http://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Thought-Process-3rd/dp/0672330164/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262547120&sr=8-5
PHP5 Objects, Patterns & Practice: http://www.amazon.com/PHP-Objects-Patterns-Practice-Second/dp/1590599098/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262546817&sr=8-3
OO Design Heuristics: http://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Design-Heuristics-Arthur-Riel/dp/020163385X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262546869&sr=8-1
To manage complexity.
Edit: Maybe I shopuld elaborate a bit more.
Programs are complex entities and many ways have been proposed historically to tame their complexity.
Procedural programming, functions, structured programming, abstract data types and object-oriented programming are just models to help programmers manage the mental effort that is required to understand a program.
Object programming will not solve everything, and certainly for a small script it is overkill, but it works great for big applications or systems.
My original answer tries to summarize the full content of the humongous Code Complete book: do your best to manage complexity and make your programs understandable for you and your successors. It's great if you think that object programming will help you in this task, but it's even better that you question its convenience and try to find better ways.
In PHP, classes can, at the very least, save you a bunch of include statements. The lazy loading of the __autoload() function is very handy. Also, you can be confident that function names in different includes won't conflict.
To go beyond that, you can start to think of creating an API around a class. Functions which are needed only by other functions within the class can be marked private. And eventually, you should be able to ignore the actual code in your classes, and just think of them as API calls.
If I call Do::stuff($a, $b) I get this response.
And that's all you need to know. You can forget how it works "under the hood" inside the class.
And then, of course, there's classes with non-static functions. These can do various interesting things that normal functions can't.
I'm hoping to get some tips to kinda help me break out of what i consider after all these years a bad habit of procedural programming. Every time i attempt to do a project in OOP i end up eventually reverting to procedural. I guess i'm not completely convinced with OOP (even though i think i've heard everything good about it!).
So i guess any good practical examples of common programming tasks that i often carry out such as user authentication/management, data parsing, CMS/Blogging/eComs are the kinda of things i do often, yet i haven't been able to get my head around how to do them in OOP and away from procedural, especially as the systems i build tend to work and work well.
One thing i can see as a downfall to my development, is that i do reuse my code often, and it often needs more rewrites and improvement, but i sometimes consider this as a natural evolution of my software development.
Yet i want to change! to my fellow programmers, help :) any tips on how i can break out of this nasty habbit?
What is the point in using object-oriented programming when you cannot find good reasons or motivation to do so?
You must be motivated by the need to conceive and manipulate ideas as objects. There are people who feel the need to be perceptive of concepts, flow or functions rather than objects and they are then motivated towards programming oriented towards concepts, ideas, or functional flow.
Some 13 years ago, I switched to c++ from c simply because there were ideas I needed but c would not easily perform. In short, my need motivated my programming oriented towards objects.
The object-oriented mind-set
First, you have bytes, chars, integers and floats.
Then your programme starts being cluttered with all kinds of variables, local and static.
Then you decide to group them into structs because you figured that all the variables which are commonly passed around.
Conglomeration of data
So like printer's info should have all its variables enclosed into the Printer struct:
{id, name, location,
impactType(laser|inkjet|ribbon),
manufacturer, networkAddr},
etc.
So that now, when you call function after function over printer info, you don't have functions with a long list of arguments or a large collection of static variables with huge possibilities of cross-talk.
Incorporation of information
But data conglomeration is not good enough. I still have to depend on a bunch of functions to process the data. Therefore, I had a smart idea or incorporating function pointers into the Printer struct.
{id, name, location,
impactType(laser|inkjet|ribbon),
manufacturer, networkAddr,
*print(struct printer),
*clean(struct printer)
}
Data graduates into information when data contains the processes on how to treat/perceive the data.
Quantization of information
Now laser, ribbon and inkjet printers do not all have the same set of information but they all have a most common set of denominators (LCD) in information:
Info common to any printer: id, name, location, etc
Info found only in ribbon printers: usedCycles, ribbon(fabric|cellophane), colourBands, etc
Info found only in inkjet: ink cartridges, etc
Info found only in lasers: ...
For me and many object-oriented cohorts, we prefer to quantize all the common info into one common information encapsulation, rather than define a separate struct/encapsulation for each printer type.
Then, we prefer to use a framework which would manage all the function referencing for each type of printer because not all printers print or are cleaned the same way.
So your preference/motivation oriented away from objects is telling you that your programming life is easier if you do not use objects? That you prefer to manage all those structural complexities yourself. You must not have written enough software to feel that way.
The necessity of laziness
Some people say - necessity is the mother of creativity. (as well as, Love of money is the root of evil).
But to me and my cohorts - laziness in the face of necessity are the parents of creativity. (as well as the lack of money is the other parent of evil).
Therefore, I urge you to adopt a lazy attitude towards programming so that the principle of the shortest path would kick into your life and you'll find but have no other choice than to graduate towards orienting yourself towards programming with objects.
Step 1. Read a good Design Patterns book. http://www.oodesign.com/
Step 2. Pick something you already know and rework it from an OO perspective. This is the Code Dojo approach. Take a problem that you already understand, and define the object classes.
I did this -- and wrote down what I did.
See http://homepage.mac.com/s_lott/books/oodesign.html#book-oodesign
You can do the same series of exercises to get the hang of OO design and code.
The OO mindset is based on principles that lie at a much more basic level than design patterns. Design patterns are somehow fashionable these days (and have been for a while), and they are useful, but they are just one more layer that you can put upon more basic stuff that you absolutely must learn and master if you want to do OO properly. In other words: you can do OO perfectly without design patterns. In fact, many of us did OO well before the phrase "design patterns" was even coined.
Now, there is stuff you can't do without. I suggest you start at the basics. Read and understand "Object-Oriented Software Construction" 2nd edition by Bertrand Meyer. It's probably the best book on OO programming around, both in width and depth. That is if you're interested in programming.
First, congrats on taking steps to learn something new! I hate it when developers decide to NOT evolve with technology.
As far as moving from procedural programming to OOP, I would say that one thing that you can do is take an existing app (as others have mentioned) and, before you even open a text editor, sit down and think about how each aspect of the application would be converted. I have found that more than half of OO programming is defining the conceptual objects in your mind first.
Again, I will agree with everyone's recommendations on design patterns. Specifically, I would look into the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern as this one might be the easiest one to grasp. You have already written code, so you should be able to look at your existing applications and begin putting each part into the M,V or C categories.
Best of luck and have fun!
There are already quite a few answers about where to find information on programming in an object-oriented fashion. Indeed, there are many great books out there that will define the basic concepts however I think the question was more on how to "stick with it" through development for someone new to the method.
Of the many concepts in object-oriented programming, the main one that will keep you on track as a newcomer is encapsulation. Does my class know how to take care of itself? Does my class have behaviour? If it doesn't, then you don't have a class, you have a structure and you'll likely be writing a lot of procedures to change its state (as it's said, "you are back to writing C in Java"). Does my class only expose methods publicly that are required for its use? Those questions may not be terribly elaborated upon but perhaps consider this thought experiment when designing your classes: What if each one of your application's classes were to be developed and maintained by a different developer on the internet and the classes also had to interact with eachother over the internet. Would each developer agree that the class they are writing and maintaining adheres to the single responsibility principle and therefore be happy that they aren't maintaining what should be someone elses code?
Regarding the design of class interfaces, consider writing all of the code that uses your classes first. Don't worry about what has to happen at the metal yet. You should be able to stub out the entire program in terms of the class relationships before you write your first bit-twiddling implementation detail. If you can't do this without twiddling bits or making a variable public, then it is time to go back to your class relationship diagram and see if you are missing an abstraction. Phrased another way, use your code before you write your code. Do this first, and you might be suprised how clean your code and interfaces turn out if you've never done it before.
While design patterns are certainly good to learn, and some are extremely powerful, they aren't generally intrinsically object-oriented and as some argue (and I tend to agree) design patterns are often just exposed weaknesses in the language. One language's design patterns is another's basic founding principles. So when starting, don't get hung up on whether or not some relationship is a good candidate for a bridge or a facade; this is not specific to object-oriented thought, this is related to what a specific language's constructs afford.
Don't.
First, learn writing. Second, learn user experience and interaction design. Third, learn business analysis. Fourth, learn role modeling.
Now that you know what objects are, you will come to see that objects are not found in code. They are found at runtime; in the space between the machine and the user's mind. This is what object orientation really means. Unfortunately recent academia has twisted it into an engineering concept. Nothing could be further off the mark. And try as they might to emulate, the end result is crap. Why? Because the "OOP" paradigm as the industry knows it today is built on a fundamentally flawed idea: decompositional analysis of identity. How is this flawed? Because identity in and of itself is meaningless. It is void. In a mathematical sense, in a philosophical sense. This is not how a human being perceives and interacts with the world.
Canon: Alan Kay, Trygve Reenskaug, James (Jim) Coplien
How I wish I was in your position. :)
I think it helps to first skim over some existing, decent, proven object-oriented code (e.g. Qt source code) so you can get a feel for "how it's done". After that, learning from a book or creating your own framework will be much more effective.
In general, it really helps to see things in context before reading about and practicing them, as it gives you moments to say to yourself, "Oh, that's why they did that!" At least that's how it works for me.
The hard part of OO is which stuff should be put together into one object. As you already mentioned the evolution of your source code, here you have a simple guideline on how to evolve your source code towards an OO design:
"Put stuff together that changes together."
When two pieces of code have similar change velocities, that's a hint that they should be placed in the same object. When the change velocities are different, consider placing them in different objects.
This is also known as "Change Velocity".
If you follow that guideline your code will naturally evolve towards a good OO design. Why?
Fragments of code often have similar
change velocities if they access a
common representation. Every time the
representation changes, all the pieces
of code that use it must change at
once. This is part of the reason we
use objects as modules to encapsulate
representation. Separating interface
from implementation makes sense under
this guideline too - the
implementation changing more often and
thus having a higher change velocity.
If a class has a stable part and an
unstable part, that's a difference in
change velocity that suggests moving
the stable part to a (possibly
abstract) base class.
Similarly, if a class has two parts
which change equally often but at
different times or in different
directions (that is to say, for
different reasons), then that again
suggests refactoring the class.
Sometimes replace "class" with
"method". For example, if one line of
a method is likely to change more
often than the rest - perhaps it is
the line which creates a new object
instance and contains the name of its
class - consider moving it to its own
routine. Then subclasses can easily
effect their change by overriding it.
I came across this concept on C2 wiki many years ago, but I've rarely seen it used since. I find it very useful. It expresses some crucial underlying motivation of object oriented design. Of course, it's therefore blindingly obvious.
These are changes of the program.
There is another sense of change
velocity - you don't want instance
variables changing at different rate,
or rather that is a sign of potential
problems. For example, in a graphics
editor you shouldn't keep the figures
and the handles in the same
collection, because the figures change
once a minute or once an hour and the
handles change once a second or once a
minute.
In a somewhat larger view, you want a
system to be able to change fast
enough to keep up with the changes in
the business.
PS: the other principle that you should follow is "Law of Demeter", that is, an object should only talk to its friends. Friends are: yourself, instance variables, parameters, locals, and members of friendly collections - but not globals and static variables.
You might consider using the CRC (Class/Responsibility/Collaboration) card approach to OO design. This is nothing too scary - just a way to sort out what your objects should be, and which object should be responsible for which tasks by writing stuff down on a bunch of file cards to help clarify your thoughts.
It was originally designed as a teaching tool for OO thought, and might work for you. The original paper is at: http://c2.com/doc/oopsla89/paper.html
A poster above suggested programming in Smalltalk to force you into OO habits, and to an extent that's a good suggestion - Smalltalk certainly did me a lot of good, but
a) you may not have the spare time to learn a new language. If you do, great.
b) I used to tutor a university course in OO programming, using Smalltalk, and the students did an excellent job of proving that old joke about how "You can write FORTRAN in any language".
Finally: when I was learning about OO (from books) I got the impression that you subclassed a lot, creating complicated class hierarchies. When I started working with OO programmers I realised it didn't happen as often as I thought. I think everyone makes this mistake when they're learning.
The only way to write better code is to write more code. Take a project you've implemented procedurally and convert it to OOP (assuming you're working in a language that supports both). You'll probably end up with a fragile, tightly coupled solution the first time around, but that's ok. Take the bad OOP implementation and start refactoring it into something better. Eventually, you'll figure out what works, and what doesn't.
When you're ready to take the next step, pick up a Design Patterns book and learn some of the OOP design terminology. This isn't strictly necessary, but it will give you a better grasp of some of the common problems and solutions.
I think you should convince yourself by researching all of the downsides with procedural programming, for example (some buzzwords following, watch out): scope, state ... practically you'd be able to extract many terms just by reading examples of design patterns (read: common examples of using objects together.)
Stressing yourself into learning something you don't believe in won't get you anywhere. Start being really critical on your earlier work and refactor it to avoid copied code and using the global scope, and you'll find yourself wanting more.
For me the ah-ha moment of OOP was the first time I looked at code and realised I could refactor common stuff into a base class. You clearly know your way around code and re-use, but you need to think around classes not procedures. With user authentication it's clear you're going to have a username and password, now they go into the base class, but what if you need a tokenId as well, re-use your existing login base class, and create a new subclass from that with the new behaviour, all your existing code works without change.
See how that works for you.
Well, first off design patterns are about the worst thing to pattern your programming to.
It's just a big set of things. It's nothing to do with OOP, and most of them such as singleton are constantly used for all the wrong reasons (ie initialization). Some of these things you have to use so telling you about them is pointless, others are counterproductive, and the rest are just special case things. If you try to learn anything this way everything will start to look like some bizarre doodad someone came up with for a very special problem or because they needed infinite genericity (which is seldom true). Don't let people con you into using a million iterators and templates for no reason and make things ten times more complicated.
Really OOP is a simple subject that gets massively overcomplicated. Unfortunately in C++ it has a lot of issues but really simple virtual methods are what matters. Pure virtual base classes used much like a java interface object are the most useful but also just plain virtual methods here and there will come in handy.
It's mostly been overblown. It also doesn't lend itself well to every problem. If you make database and gui stuff it lends itself well to that. If you make system tools it is usually not as helpful.
I found that one of the things which has really helped solidify the benefits of OOP for me has been writing unit tests with a mock object framework (such as EasyMock). Once you start to develop that way, you can see how classes help you isolate modules behind interfaces and also allow for easier testing.
One thing to keep in mind is that when people are first learning OOP, often there is an overemphasis on inheritance. Inheritance has its place, but it's a tool that can easily be overused. Composition or simple interface implementation are often better ways of doing things. Don't go so far in attempting to reuse code via inheritance that you make inheritance trees which make little sense from a polymorphism standpoint. The substitution principle is what makes inheritance/interface implementation powerful, not the fact that you can reuse code by subclassing.
A great step would be to start of with a OOP framework, you can still write procedural code in the framework but over time you can refine your coding habits & start converting functionality into objects.
Also reading about patterns & data modeling will give you more ideas about to code your logic in a OOP style.
I have found that a very intense way learning to train abstraction in programming is to build a OOP library with a defined functionality, and then to implement two projects with similar but still different requirements that are building on that library, at the same time.
This is very time-consuming and you need to have learned the basics of OOP first (S.Lott has some great links in the other answer). Constant refactoring and lots of "Doh!" moments are the rule; but I found this a great way to learn modular programming because everything I did was immediately noticeable in the implementation of one of the projects.
Simply practice. If you've read everything about OOP and you know something about OOP and you know the OOP principals implemented in your language PHP... then just practice, practice and practice some more.
Now, don't go viewing OOP as the hammer and everything else as the nail, but do try to incorporate at least one class in a project. Then see if you can reuse it in another project etc..
Learn a new language, one that helps to move you gently to OOP. Java is nice, but a bit bloated, though. But its system library is mainly OO, so you are force to use objects.
Moving to another language also helps you not to reuse your old code :-)
I think it´s important to learn the theory first. So reading a book would be a good start.
I believe that the mechanics of OOP seem completely arbitrary and make no sense until you read a book on design patterns and understand the "why" of it. I recommend Head First Design Patterns. I thought OOP was ridiculous and completely useless until I picked up this book and saw what it was actually good for.
OO makes a lot more sense when you understand function pointers and how it relates to indirect function calls and late binding. Play around with function pointers in C, C++, or D for a little while and get a feel for what they're for and how they work. The polymorphism/virtual function part of OO is just another layer of abstraction on top of this.
Procedural is the right tool for some jobs. Don't act like it's wrong. IMHO all three major paradigms (procedural, OO, functional) are valuable even at a fine-grained level, within a single module. I tend to prefer:
Procedural is good when my problem is simple (or I've already factored it enough with functional and OO that I now have a subproblem that I consider simple) and I want the most straightforward solution without a lot of abstraction getting in the way.
Object-oriented is good when my problem is more complex and has lots of state that makes sense in the context of the problem domain. In these cases the existence of state is not an implementation detail, but the exact representation is one that I prefer to abstract away.
Functional is good when my problem is complex but has no state that makes sense at the level of the problem domain. From the perspective of the problem domain, the existence of state is an implementation detail.
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I'm a PHPer, and am not writing object-oriented code.
What are the advantages of OO over procedural code, and where can I learn how to apply these ideas to PHP?
It doesn't help you automatically. You can write worse "OO" programs than structural programs, and vice versa. OOP is a tool which allows you to create more powerful abstractions.
As with every powerful tool, you have to use it properly.
As with every powerful tool, it takes time to learn how to use it properly.
As with every powerful tool you will make mistakes.
As with every powerful tool you will have to practice a lot.
As with every powerful tool you should read a lot about it, and read what other people think. Learn from others.
But, as with every powerful tool, there are people out there who misuse it. Learn to not learn bad practices from them. This is hard.
Objects help keep your code isolated between different sections, so that if you need to make a change to one section you can be confident it won't affect other sections: loose coupling.
Then, when you've done that for a while, you'll start finding that objects you created for one app are also useful in others, and you start getting better code re-use as well. So the new app has part of the work already done, and is using time-tested code: software is built faster with fewer bugs.
People will tell you various things about OOP, from various perspectives. But if you want to form your own opinion, rather than take someone else's, then I suggest reading Bertrand Meyer's "Object-Oriented Software Construction".
Essentially, he takes non-OOP programming techniques, and analyses their basic flaws. He then derives an alternative technique which addresses those flaws. Put another way, he derives OOP from first principles. It's a marvellous piece of work, and very convinving.
Read it, you'll learn the why, when and what in a way that you can back up with reasoning.
Objects help encapsulate complexity. For most PHP programming, it's impossible to write good, clean code for any reasonably complicated application. Writing OO PHP helps you put that code into its own box, isolating it from everything else. This has several benefits.
As long as your object has clearly defined inputs and outputs, the way that the object does what it does doesn't matter at all - storing/retrieving data could go from flat file to XML to memcache to MySQL to Oracle, and you only ever have to concern yourself with one single object.
As long as your object has clearly defined inputs and outputs, you can completely replace it with another object that has the same inputs/outputs. Decide at runtime whether you want MySQL, Postgres, memcached, or HTTP POST/GET requests to a sketchy server in Indonesia.
OO makes unit testing easier. If you can define what a specific object should do (i.e what results it should give you for a given input) then you can easily write code to test thousands of values against that code and check the results, and you'll know instantly if something breaks.
The more of your code you 'hide' in objects, the less of it you have to see when you're using that functionality. I wrote a polling application once in PHP that handled all aspects of polling - database interaction, poll generation, voting, ranking, sorting, and displaying - and I only needed one line of code on my website (Poll::Display()) to implement the entirety of what the app could do - which made maintaining my homepage far easier.
Keep one thing in mind - OO in PHP (even PHP5) isn't very good OO compared to a language like Python or Ruby. The everything-is-an-object model in Python is what made me OO programming really click for me - and as a former PHP programmer (and doubly-certified Zend engineer), I strongly recommend exploring Python's OO if you want to understand what OO is all about. It will help you write better PHP code, at the very least.
Yes, if you really get it.
It helps you visualize how parts of a larger system can interact with each other. It's very useful at the design level.
If you are just writing a few lines of code, the only benefit you will get is that it is generally a little easier to use a library broken into well-designed objects than just functions.
To make good use of it, you also need to follow sound OO design practices. Always encapsulating ALL your data, using many small classes, never large "catch-all" classes. Having the class do your work for you instead of asking it for data and doing the work outside the class, etc.
It's probably not going to help you much for a while, and possibly never if you are always doing small websites (I can't say this for sure, I don't really do php), but over time and on large projects it can be invaluable.
One thing no one has mentioned is that OO code facilitates writing readable code:
sherry.changePhoneNumber();
phoneCompany.assignNewPhoneNumberTo(sherry);
sherry.receive(new PhoneNumber().withAreaCode("555").withNumber("194-2677"));
I get a strange satisfaction from such aesthetics.
The huge win for me is inheritance, or making an object that behaves almost exactly like another but with a few differences. Here's a real-world example from my office:
We needed code to process TIFF files that a customer sent to us, convert them to a standard format, insert some information about the file into a database, then send a result email. I wrote this in a set of classes (in Python, but the idea is the same). The "fetcher" class got emails from a POP3 mailbox and handed them to a "container" class which knew how to read attachments from an email. That class handed each image off to a "file object" class that did the necessary processing.
Well, one day we got a customer who wanted to send PDF files. I subclassed the "TIFF file object" class and rewrote the "normalize" function to take a PDF as input instead, but left every other bit of code untouched. It worked the first time and I was pretty pleased.
A change to our mailserver meant that I needed to fetch emails via IMAP. Again, I subclassed the "POP3 fetcher" so that it could speak IMAP. Problem solved.
Another customer wanted to mail us CDs, so I subclassed the "email container" class with a "filesystem directory" class. Voila - done.
In each of those cases, the new code was 95% similar to the old code. For example, the "TIFF file object" class has about 15 methods. The "PDF file object" class defines exactly one: the method that converts files in a specific format into our standard. All others it gets from its parent class.
Now, you can definitely do the same kind of stuff procedurally, such as by writing:
if fileobjecttype == 'TIFF':
data = <snip 30 lines of code to read and convert a TIFF file>
elif fileobjecttype == 'PDF':
data = <another 45 lines to read a PDF>
elif fileobjecttype == 'PNG':
data = <yep, another one>
The biggest difference is that I believe you can make OOP look much cleaner and more organized. My PDF class looks like:
class PDFReader(GenericImageReader):
def normalize(self):
data = <45 lines to read a PDF>
and that's it. You can tell at a glance that it only does one thing differently than the class it inherits from. It also forces you - or at least strongly encourages you - to make clean interfaces between the layers of your application. In my example, the PDFReader has no idea and doesn't care whether its image came from a POP3 mailbox or a CD-ROM. The POP3 fetcher knows absolutely nothing about attachments, since its job is merely getting emails and passing them along. In practice, this has allowed us to do some pretty amazing things with the absolute minimum amount of coding or redesign.
OOP isn't magic, but it's a pretty fantastic way to keep your code organized. Even if you don't use it everywhere, it's still a skill that you really should develop.
There was a time, back when i first started programming, that i wrote user-oriented code. It worked great, but was hard to maintain.
Then, i learned OO, and the code i wrote become easier to maintain, easier to share between projects, and life was good... for everyone except my users.
Now, i know the true silver bullet of computer programming. I write OO code, but first i objectify my users. Treating people as objects may seem rude at first, but it makes everything much more elegant - you get to write all of your software to work with clearly-defined interfaces, and when a user sends an unexpected message you can merely ignore it, or, if marked with a flag signifying sufficient importance, throw an exception at them.
Life, with OO, is good...
I would argue that OOP suits those who think in 'objects', where an object consists of data as well as the functions that operate on that data.
If you tend to think of functions and the data they operate on as separate things, then you are a procedural programmer.
If you tend to think of functions and the data they operate on as being connected, then you are an object-oriented programmer.
I'd caution against going out and learning about patterns. In order to do object-oriented programming well, you need to teach yourself to think like an object-oriented programmer. You'll need to get to the point where you understand and can name the benefits of:
Encapsulation
Classes vs instances/objects
Inheritance and polymorphism
It will help you to be a better programmer only in the sense that the more styles of programming a programmer knows, the more range in his repertoire for solving problems and writing elegant code. You cannot go off and write all your code object-oriented and automatically have good code, but if you really understand how OOP works, and you're not just copy-pasting some popular design patterns of the day, then you can write some pretty good code, especially when writing a large application.
It seems everybody is responding to your question literally, i.e., the specific benefits/drawbacks of OO.
You should learn OO, but not because OO has any specific magic that you need.
The more general form is:
Q: "Should I learn (OO, FP, concurrent, logic-based, event-driven, ...) programming?"
A: "Yes, learning a new paradigm is always useful, even if you don't use it directly every day."
I would put it this way: If you write anything complex, you should encode the concepts you think in, rather than trying to think in concepts that are somehow native to the language you are using. This way you make less bugs. The formalization of those concepts is called design.
Functional programming lets you define concepts that are associated with verbs, since each function is essentially a verb (e.g., print()). OO programming, on the other hand, lets you also define concepts associated with nouns.
To elaborate on Joeri's answer a little:
The International Organisation for Standardization defines encapsulation as, 'The property that the information contained in an object is accessible only through interactions at the interfaces supported by the object.'
Thus, as some information is accessible via these interfaces, some information must be hidden and inaccessible within the object. The property such information exhibits is called information hiding, which Parnas defined by arguing that modules should be designed to hide both difficult decisions and decisions that are likely to change.
Note that word: change. Information hiding concerns potential events, such as the changing of difficult design decisions in the future.
Consider a class with two methods: method a() which is information hidden within the class, and method b() which is public and thus accessible directly by other classes.
There is a certain probability that a future change to method a() will require changes in methods in other classes. There is also a certain probability that a future change to method b() will require changes in methods in other classes. The probability that such ripple changes will occur for method a(), however, will usually be lower than that for method b() simply because method b() may be depended upon by more classes.
This reduced probability of ripple impacts is a key benefit of encapsulation.
Consider the maximum potential number of source code dependencies (MPE - the acronym is from graph theory) in any program. Extrapolating from the definitions above, we can say that, given two programs delivering identical functionality to users, the program with the lowest MPE is better encapsulated, and that statistically the more well-encapsulated program will be cheaper to maintain and develop, because the cost of the maximum potential change to it will be lower than the maximum potential change to the less well-encapsulated system.
Consider, furthermore, a language with just methods and no classes and hence no means of information hiding methods from one another. Let's say our program has 1000 methods. What is the MPE of this program?
Encapsulation theory tells us that, given a system of n public nodes, the MPE of this system is n(n-1). Thus the MPE of our 1000 public methods is 999,000.
Now let's break that system into two classes, each having 500 methods. As we now have classes, we can choose to have some methods public and some methods private. This will be the case unless every method is actually dependent on every other method (which is unlikely). Let's say that 50 methods in each class is public. What would the MPE of the system be?
Encapsulation theory tells us it's: n((n/r) -1 + (r-1)p) where r is the number of classes, and p is the number of public methods per class. This would give our two-class system an MPE of 499,000. Thus the maximum potential cost of a change in this two-class system is already substantially lower than that of the unencapsulated system.
Let's say you break your system into 3 classes, each having 333 classes (well, one will have 334), and again each with 50 public methods. What's the MPE? Using the above equation again, the MPE would be approximately 482,000.
If the system is broken into 4 classes of 250 methods each, the MPE will would be 449,000.
If may seem that increasing the number of classes in our system will always decrease its MPE, but this is not so. Encapsulation theory shows that the number of classes into which the system should be decomposed to minimise MPE is: r = sqrt(n/p), which for our system is actually 4. A system with 6 classes, for example, would have an MPE of 465,666.
The Principle of Burden takes two forms.
The strong form states that the burden of transforming a collection of entities is a function of the number of entities transformed. The weak form states that the maximum potential burden of transforming a collection of entities is a function of the maximum potential number of entities transformed.
In slightly more detail, the burden of creating or modifying any software system is a function of the number of program units created or modified.
Program units that depend on a particular, modified program unit have a higher probability of being impacted than program units that do not depend on the modified program unit.
The maximum potential burden an modified program unit can impose is the impacting of all program units that depend on it.
Reducing the dependencies on an modified program unit therefore reduces the probability that its update will impact other program units and so reduces the maximum potential burden that that program unit can impose.
Reducing the maximum potential number of dependencies between all program units in a system therefore reduces the probability that an impact to a particular program unit will cause updates to other program units, and thus reduces the maximum potential burden of all updates.
Thus, encapsulation is a foundation stone of object orientation and encapsulation helps us to reduce the maximum potential number of dependencies between all program units and to mitigate the weak form of the Principle of Burden.
I'm a long-time procedural PHP programmer who occasionally dabbles in object oriented PHP. Joel's answer above is an excellent summary of the benefits. In my opinion, a subtle secondary benefit, is that it forces you to better define your requirements from the start. You have to understand the relationships between the objects and the methods that will be acting upon them.
A good book to help with the transition is Peter Lavin's "Object-Oriented PHP".
A large system, such as Wordpress, Drupal, or XOOPS, uses OOP concepts. You can see the benefits of their use there. Code reuse, modularity, maintainability, and extensibility.
You have the ability to modify parts of objects and it affects the entire application; no searching to replace every spot you did some operation (and possibly missing it).
You can reuse objects all over, saving an awful lot of copying and pasting. Patching a bug requires patching the one object, not 16 pages of code that all do the same thing.
When you encapsulate the logic and "hide" the implementation, it's easier to use the objects, both for you 6 months from now when you've forgotten why you did something, and for the nest guy or gal who uses your code. For example, all you do to loop through posts in Wordpress is call a function. I don't need to know how it works, I only need to know how to call it.
OOP is really procedural code wrapped in object methods/functions. You do still need to know how to write decent linear code in order to implement methods and functions of objects. It just makes it far easier to reuse, scale, fix, debug, and maintain your things.
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2005/07/28/oo_php.html
I would say there are two primary benefits:
Encapsulation: code in libraries that shouldn't be called from outside the library can be hidden, preventing misuse, and easing changes to the internal structure of the library while preserving the external interface. In a good OO design, changes are introduced more easily once the code is complete.
Abstraction: instead of dealing with arrays of arrays you're dealing with employees, departments, and so on. This means you can focus on the business logic, and write fewer lines of code. Fewer lines means fewer bugs.
Reuse I wouldn't strictly qualify as an OO benefit, because in a purely procedural model smart library organization lets you reuse code as well.
On the other hand, using lots of objects in PHP tends to decrease performance compared to a procedural model, because there is too much object construction overhead for every request. Finding a good balance between procedural-style and oo-style code is imperative.
To learn OO in PHP I'd recommend try to use some good written OO PHP framework.
You may want to look at Zend Framework.
I am a PHP aswell, although I do have a strong OOP background, I would say the best book on using OOP with PHP has to be PHP 5 Objects Patterns and Practice
One of the best thing that I did with OOP in PHP is the class generator.
In any given table, it will involve almost the same SQL operations:
insert
update
select
delete
exists (check if a row exists)
search
list
Now I don't have to write all these SQL statements anymore, except on special conditions. Not only I've cut down coding to 1 minute in doing above, I've also saved time from debugging codes.
So whenever there are changes to the table structure, I simply regenerate the class.
Probably you should try the same as it works for me and my customers like it!