Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Programming Discussion : Namespaces in PHP

[Sheps]

What do you guys think about namespaces being added to PHP. I personally cannot find any use for them in my coding, but I imagine it will be useful for some people.

[Steve_Arm]

The main reason is avoiding conflicts with various libraries integrated in to a project.

[etogre]

The main thing I see it being good for is things like the Zend framework, where you have class definitions like:

PHP Code:

class Zend_Auth_Adapter_Http_Resolver_File implements Zend_Auth_Adapter_Http_Resolver_Interface { 


That's not to say that Zend will use namespaces, considering their naming conventions are directly based on the directory set up.

Personally, I probably won't have to use them. But I can definitely see a few frameworks taking it on, especially as people shift from PHP4 to the newer versions (It's hard to find a host without PHP5 at this point!)

[vibrokatana]

Originally Posted by Sheps

What do you guys think about namespaces being added to PHP. I personally cannot find any use for them in my coding, but I imagine it will be useful for some people.

The main advantage IMO, is to avoid collisions between multiple libraries. If you import two files with the same function name, then you will have a fun time with things.

[Czaries]

I probably won't personally use them, at least not at first. A good class naming convention like Zend uses already addresses this problem, and I have been using that already in my own class library and framework.

It may be helpful in some areas though, like naming Models and Controllers that aren't in the core library and don't really follow the directory naming convention. I could easily see using 'Zend::BlogController' instead of 'BlogController' as being very helpful.