Comments on: Stop including class files and use __autoload() instead

By: San Diego Therapist

San Diego Therapist — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 07:21:24 +0000

Wow…this really works well. No more require or includes of object classes and the memory savings is great!

Thanks!

By: Les

Les — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:58:57 +0000

Marc

You use lower case characters not because of __autoload(); but purely because it’s stable across platforms and increases portability.

It’s also a convention, a best practice so go with it, rather than chop and change as you see fit (if that’s what your doing).

By: Peter Mescalchin

Peter Mescalchin — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 08:16:19 +0000

@jaisen: I remember reading similar reports with APC. With eAccelerator at least hits are certainly made to the bytecode cache when using this method after checking its stats.

I think the issue with APC might be to do with paths to scripts being relative, rather than absolute, which would be a problem __autoload() or not. The autoload wrapper I use uses a full path from the root of the file system – so maybe that’s why I am having success?

By: jaisen

jaisen — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:23:26 +0000

@Mike, While I see troelskn’s point…I’m going to have to agree with you on this one. The points he brings up are extremely valid but I don’t think this specific case is the best example of when the case insensitivity of PHP can “taken advantage of”.

By: jaisen

jaisen — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:21:12 +0000

@Peter, I know internally here at Yahoo there’s been some discussion on times when apc does not cache require/include calls. I don’t want to speak out of ignorance because I can’t remember the specifics but I thought it had to do with dynamically created paths. I want to find out for sure…I’m sure it’ll be another blog post of it’s own as that’s a very important behavior to understand.

By: Peter Mescalchin

Peter Mescalchin — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:24:51 +0000

@wesley – __autoload() doesn’t do the require/include itself, you need to define the function – which in most cases will wrap a require/include call – so to answer your question, yes APC/eAccelerator will still function – its still require/include under the covers.

Another great thing with __autoload() it works with ‘extends’… e.g.

class myclass extends baseclass {}

__autoload() will be called for both ‘myclass’ and ‘baseclass’.

I do a similar system to “troelskn/PEAR”, using underscores to name my classes, then breaking that down into subfolders in my class folder. One file per class works really well for me. __autoload() is a godsend.

By: Mike Cubes

Mike Cubes — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:55:53 +0000

@troelskn Just because it is valid PHP to write a class name in whatever case you want to at the time, doesn’t mean it is a good idea. Writing all your code under the assumption that the language and the OS are both case-sensitive is a great way to have maintainable, portable, well written code. Yes, I know that PHP is case-insensitive, but that doesn’t mean we as developers have to be. Defining MyClass, then using myClass looks amateur and doesn’t follow a consistent pattern. The hack of running strtolower() inside of __autoload() to account for lazy programmers seams like a waste of a function call to me.

By: wesley

wesley — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:51:58 +0000

What about APC and others, will they still be able to optimize/cache php requests equally well as when you use require?

By: Jasper

Jasper — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:58:06 +0000

I love the autoload function, but have found it quite difficult to convince people of its benefits!

I personally do what troelskn said in the first comment – lowercase all directories and filenames, classes are like Model_Core and User_Model are in core/model.php and model/user.php for portability – never know what sort operating systems clients are going to be using on their servers!

By: troelskn

troelskn — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:36:04 +0000

@Marc But you’re _not_ trying to load a file; You’re trying to instantiate a class. It is valid PHP syntax, to write the classname in whichever case, you want. So you will get no error on Windows, but you would on unix. That makes your program non-portable. That’s a pretty good reason in my book.