Classes. What's the point?

Question

I\'m fairly new to OOP in PHP, I\'ve made a couple of basic scripts but nothing impressive. All I\'ve really taken from it is that it would probably be easier just make a co

Answer 1

In PHP, classes can, at the very least, save you a bunch of include statements. The lazy loading of the __autoload() function is very handy. Also, you can be confident that function names in different includes won't conflict.

To go beyond that, you can start to think of creating an API around a class. Functions which are needed only by other functions within the class can be marked private. And eventually, you should be able to ignore the actual code in your classes, and just think of them as API calls.

If I call Do::stuff($a, $b) I get this response.

And that's all you need to know. You can forget how it works "under the hood" inside the class.

And then, of course, there's classes with non-static functions. These can do various interesting things that normal functions can't.