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Elegant PHP Architectures?
akweboa164 asks: "I work as a lone developer creating small to medium scale PHP/MySQL websites for different clients. I have been doing this for about two years now, and have tried different things as far as website layout/architecture goes. With sites that use the fusebox architecture, front controller (thanks J2EE), N-tier, to having a simple 'include(config.php);' line at the top of every file, I am left with the feeling that all of the sites I have created are 50% elegance, and 50% nasty kludge. I am left with a sinking feeling because I know that they could be better, but I lack to expertise and experience to make them that way. I am looking for overall architecture that is open and fits within the constraints of PHP (ie. relying little on OO) and separates logic, makes updates easy, etc. I wanted to ask Slashdot's crowd of web developers what their most elegant code layout/design web solutions were, and what advice would you dish out to new developers, as well as seasoned professionals."
And PLEASE, use PHP objects. Someday PHP will be a "good" programming language with good OO features, get used to what it has now.
I hope you are not implying to use objects for the sake of using objects. I use objects where they are needed. But in a language that is not bound to them, they are not needed all the time. I remember someone wanted to have a String class be part of PEAR. Why on earth do you need a string class in a language with such great string functions? I have seen object overkill and it is not a pretty thing.
Where do I use them? When I need to keep stuff "behind the curtain". We have a class to display large tabular data that we use. It is the right choice as we just call $report->addrow("data", "data"...); and the class keeps up with it all in vars for us and there is no mess.
So, use them where they are appropriate, is my advice.
Brian.
Phorum.org