Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Programming Discussion : PHP - OOP or not?

[w3bdesign]

I am considering making a large web based project in PHP, and I am considering the cons and pros between OOP and classes, and straight forward PHP. Can anyone give me some ideas or suggestions, and when I should use OOP based PHP?

[phpdevrus]

Both methods are fine. In my opinion I use oop only when i am coding a feature that i think i might be able to use in the future for another project. By doing this you can slowly build up a librairy of classes :-) heh to make future development faster and easier... But also you dont want to go over board and do everything in oop as I have sometimes found that to slow things down for me.

btw this should probably go in the programming forum not in the employment one. just a thought.

[w3bdesign]

But is OOP and/or classes recommended for larger projects?

[phpdevrus]

well oop is classes... oop is the use of classes in your code.

Definitely for large projects i would use oop. :-)

[nexcess.net]

While I lean toward OO for most of my projects I would have to defer to "what you know and like best". I've seen soo many projects that choose OO because it's "better" or "betting for bigger projects" and the developers don't really have a handle on *why* it's better or how they can exploit OO to their advantage. I'd recommend this advice for all projects regardless of the OO or procedural implementation: DESIGN.

Many large projects use OO and many use procedrual, is one way better? who knows it's still debated to this day. But if you're used to one way and can perform the task efficiently one way then spending the time to "switch" to the other probably won't bring you the rewards that the other method touted.

Chris

Chris

[mikaelhg]

What does "large web project" mean in this context?

In PHP, Perl and Python one can break the base OOP paradigms rather easily, so reaping full benefits from OOP requires as much experience and self-discipline as doing C OOP development (which is totally possible as well.)

[innova]

There can be some tradeoffs with OOP as well - Its proponents seem to imply that it is universally better in every situation, which is clearly untrue.

There can be situations where OOP adds overhead and can become a bottleneck, slowing down your script. On the other hand, it can be a much cleaner way to lay out a project and lends itself very well to code reuse and modification without rewriting many lines of code.

For that reason, in small projects, with one developer - use what you are comfortable with.

For large projects with complex interconnections and multiple developers OOP may be a LOT more attractive than procedural code if only for organizational and code-reuse purposes.

I sense that you probably know procedural programming already and are wondering if you need to learn OOP - the answer is dependent upon your sitation and the complexity of your project.

MY disclaimer: I usually work on smaller projects and prefer procedural programming

[Sheps]

This is really a one sided question, like someone pointed out above.

It is a choice of either "should I us OOP, or should i us OOP"

Well, the benefit of using OOP is that you can reuse the classes you make for more then one project. Or in more then one implementation in a project.

Depending on the size of the project though, it might be counterproductive to create classes for implementation. If you are goignt o be using more then three pages and/or filesize is larger then 3K, then you might be better off going OOP.

[wuwen]

I think for straight forward PHP, it is also possible to reuse the code by grouping codes in functions. So reusable of code is not the attractive reasons of using OOP.

It should be the easier maintainability and debuggability that make OOP approach attractive. However, PHP 4 is not that good in OOP organisation. I heard that PHP 5 is designed with OOP in minds, so if you would like to use OOP approach, I would suggest you to use PHP 5, but the tradeoff is that there may not much host support it yet.

[ferox]

IMO, if your project is bigger than a certain size and a few developers are involved, OOP would help you in organization, reusability, extensibility and maintenance of your code. OOP isn't suitable for small project due to the extra overhead it brings but for large projects where many other paradigms beside fast execution matters, OOP seems the choice.

[hiryuu]

As long as you plan out your project, either style will work. OOP strongly encourages interface and design forethought, so it does tend to work better in large projects.

[nnormal]

OOP would help you in organization,

IMO this is the best part of OOP. It gives you clean breaks between different parts of the code making it easier to give one part to one dev, one part to another and maybe a third to a designer while still being able to tweek the "architecture" as a web master.