Are 'registry' classes good practice?

[JoeyH3]

I'm trying to teach myself OOP PHP, and I've been looking up a number of tutorials on how to to make OOP MVC frameworks. I came across this one (cached version - their site is down at the moment of posting), and noticed something interesting about it that I've not seen in other tutorials.

 

Basically, it creates a registry class as $registry (which just uses the __set and __get functions to populate an initially empty array), and then stores variables in there. After that, $registry is passed on to the other classes via their __construct functions, so that they can access site-wide variables.

 

I think I understand how it's working, and see how it can be used, but this tutorial is the only time I've found such a thing. I was wondering, is using such a class good practice, or how should I store and access globally needed variables (like configuration, database connections, etc)?

[trq]

As long as this registry is injected via __constructs I don't see it as such a bad thing. It is basically a IoC container in that case.

 

Just make sure that you are type hinting to a well defined interface for this Registry.

 

The registry pattern has the potential to cause issue when you make it a singleton that has a static getInstance() method or similar.