I am making a wrapper class to seperate my forms from my data access. I also want to us a validate class within this class to help with server side checking of form data. What I have done so far is as follows(php5): In the __constructor function: require_once("validate.php"); . . . I would like to put an instance into a property here $this->validator = &new validate; or something. } Then further down in my checkRequired function I would like to say the equivalent of this.validator.isEmail($_POST['email'] to validate the email entery. I don't know what the syntax should be? Thanks in advance for your help. Terry