NYCPHP Meetup

[Jose Villegas]

I don't use classes in my code unless I see a real benefit.

One benefit of putting your functions in a class is that it simplifies 
your namespace. For example, if you have a whole bunch of templating 
functions, you can create a class named "Templates" for them. A 
printing function would then be $templateObject->print() instead of 
templatePrint(). You have to be more careful about names clashing with 
the second approach as opposed to the first.

A second benefit is the ability to reuse variables instead of having to 
pass them each time a function is called. Let's say you're going to do 
a number of operations on a specific record in a database table. You 
could create a class called DbRecord that takes the table name and a 
name/value pair to identify the record:
$dbRecord = new DbRecord('color', 'blue', 'table_name');
You can then set up an update function to generate specific sql 
statements and send database queries.
$dbRecord->update('material', 'suede');
This function would set up the SQL statement, 'UPDATE table_name SET 
material="suede" WHERE color="blue"'.

Jose