The essentials of Object Oriented PHP

Object oriented programming came late to PHP. It has been around in other languages like C++, Ruby, Python and JavaScript for much longer, but its demand in PHP is becoming stronger. With that demand for the programming style there is an increasing demand for developers who can program in object oriented PHP. And those programmers typically earn considerably more than their fellow web developers whose background is only limited to procedural PHP. But this does not tell the full story. Consider the following facts : Procedural programming is inefficient PHP frameworks rely on object oriented PHP Drupal and other CMS systems are now object oriented There are more and more parts of WordPress becoming object oriented Let's expand on the first fact as it is the most important one - everything else flows from it, i.e. object oriented programming is gaining popularity because it is more efficient. There are great applications written in the procedural style of PHP, but even the best end up in spaghetti code where functions and variables are mixed together. Add in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to this mix and the code becomes something that is, well, inefficient. Object oriented code is more organized. Distinct units are created for a single purpose. This means it is easier to find things in the code (ending those days of spending hours trawling through lines of spaghetti code to find a single element). It is also easier to add, replace or remove parts of code as it only has to be done once. With procedural programming, on the other hand, it is necessary to change every instance. Finally, object oriented programming gives the opportunity to developers to integrate code libraries from other resources. This is done without worrying about name collisions, even though some of the functions in the code might have the same name.