Designs & Patterns on Justin Carmony

PHP Singletons, Sub-Classing, and HAS-A Relationships

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 06:37:53 +0000

I’ve been very busy these last fews weeks and have neglected making any posts. While there are a variety of subjects I’d love to post about, they’ll most likely have to wait until the next year. However, I thought I might be able to throw up a quick example of how to use PHP Singletons and extending public classes.

The Singleton Pattern “is a design pattern that is used to restrict instantiation of a class to one object.” (Wikipedia) In PHP, a singleton is created by making the constructor protected or private. “How do you create an object then?” Its done in two parts. First, you make a static class variable that is private, to hold the instance. Second, create a static function to return the instance. Here is an example:

PHP Design - Biggest Database Oversights

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 07:56:44 +0000

Over the last three years I’ve had the opportunity to work on several PHP projects, some of them having grown rapidly and required to scale quickly. Three in particular have been a fantastic learning experience for me. Now I don’t consider myself a total expert, but I thought I would share my experiences. Many PHP developers are self-taught, like I was, and are learning PHP to be able to create dynamic websites. Many haven’t had studied or learned best practices for Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). They are web designers first, and programming in PHP is just a way to do things simple HTML can’t do.

Five common PHP design patterns that aren't used enough

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:09:34 +0000

“This article explains five widely used design patterns in PHP with sample code to demonstrate each pattern. Intermediate level.”

I can’t say how many PHP programmers that could benefit from using these “design patterns.” So many times PHP, and PHP coders, make me feel like we’re just writing hacks all day. A solid understanding of these patterns and when to use the can make large projects better and more sound. It is so easy to write a complex website. It is a total pain trying to maintain it. These patterns are all about maintaining code, not just writing it.