Building an Extensible Menu Class (
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So you know the theory behind OOP, but don't really understand
its applications? Well, it's time to take objects out of the classroom and
into the real world - this article demonstrates how OOP can save you time
and effort by building a PHP-based Menu object to describe the
relationships in a hierarchical menu tree. And since the proof of the
pudding is in the eating, it then combines the newly-minted Menu object
with some of the most popular JavaScript menu systems available online to
show you how cool objects really are.How many times have you sat down to code a script and - halfway through -
thought to yourself, "Didn't I do something similar just last week?"
If
you're anything like the average Web developer, you probably ask yourself this
question at least once every few days. And more often than not, you're torn
between coding the same functions again (because you're already halfway there
and looking for last week's code just isn't worth the effort) and spending an
hour searching for that itty-bitty script on your twenty-terabyte hard drive
(because it's just more convenient to modify last week's code than to write it
all over again.)
It's to resolve precisely this sort of dilemma that a
bunch of white-haired software gurus (who, according to legend, live on a snowy
mountain peak in the Himalayas and spend most of their time coding algorithms to
calculate the value of pi to the nth decimal) came up with the concept of
object-oriented programming. Very simply, object-oriented programming allows
developers to create reusable, extensible program modules in order to speed up
code development and maintenance.
Now, you may not know this, but my
favourite language and yours, PHP, comes with some pretty powerful OOP
capabilities. And over the course of this article, I'm going to demonstrate some
of them by building an object to address a very common task - generating a menu
tree on a Web site. That's not all, though - once I've successfully created a
Menu object, I'm going to torture-test it with some of the most popular menu
systems available on the Web to see if it does, in fact, offer any significant
advantages.
If all goes well, this experiment should teach you a little
about the theory and possible applications of OOP; provide you with a Menu class
which is (hopefully) useful to you in your development activities; and perhaps
even spark off some ideas for using PHP classes in your next project. If, on the
other hand, I crash and burn, you'll have something to snicker over at the pub
tonight.
Sounds like fun? Keep reading.
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