OO PHP Primer (v. 4.x)

Warning, I’m new to this.

Warning, I’m assuming you’re not new to OOP.

I’ve hacked away at some PHP before on a couple of projects and I’m now building a Facebook app for a buddy. That’s all going really well but I didn’t want to spend my time slapping away, procedural-style, at the code, I’ve done that before and generally I prefer OOP, thanks.

Here is the first step, PHP4 style. PHP5 appears to have all sorts of useful access modifiers and the like… PHP4 is more widespread but a little less feature rich. For a variety of reasons, mostly to do with default hosting settings we’re sticking to PHP4.

<?php
class MyClass {
	var $myInstanceVariable;
	function myClassMethod($foo) {
		return "hello world $foo";
	}
	function myInstanceMethod() {
		return "hello caller $this->myInstanceVariable";
	}
}

$myObject = new MyClass();
$myObject->myInstanceVariable = "tim";
echo $myObject->myInstanceMethod(); //=> hello caller tim
echo MyClass::myClassMethod("harding"); //=> hello world harding
?>

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