OOP php

[Bryce910]

I am curious when you guys write php applications and you use OOP do you guys put all your classes in 1 file or do you separate each class into a different file? Which way is perferred by professional programmers?

[Jessica]

Each class in it's own file.

[xyph]

A file for each class.

 

Every class in a single file means you have to include every class, even if you only want to use a couple of them.

 

Debugging a 10,000+ line file would be UGLY

[creata.physics]

I have at least 5 classes in a file called library.php, this contains a few factory and static classes which are used quite often. I have a file called singletons.php which contains about 3 singletons inside that file. So it really depends on your coding style and how you want to have everything organized and structured. How you have it set up won't make your code any more/less object oriented.

[KevinM1]

It's often easier to keep it to one class/file due to __autoload, or its SPL counterpart.  Unless you like manually referencing include files.

[creata.physics]

That also depends on how your script is set up. I have many library classes in one file that all have functions that can operate independantly.

So once I include the file basically all classes are autoloaded.

include_once( 'library.php' );
form_lib::function( );
user_lib::function( );
date_lib::function( );

 

Although the very beginning of this page:

http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.autoload.php

It says, "Many developers writing object-oriented applications create one PHP source file per-class definition".

 

So really it's up to you. You can do things the way many other developers do them. Or you can find a way that perfectly suits you by creating code to handle these types of instances themselves.