Faking Late Static Binding before php 5.3

Question

I need an inherited static function \"call\" to call another static function \"inner\" that has been overridden. I could do this with late static binding, but my host does

Answer 1

Unfortunately there is no nice way to do it (otherwise PHPers wouldn't cheer so much for that feature).

You have to pass class name. PHP < 5.3 also doesn't have nice syntax for static calls with dynamic class name which makes whole thing even uglier:

static function call($class)
{
    return call_user_func(array($class,"inner"));
}
…
ClassA::call("ClassA");
ClassB::call("ClassB");

If you can change the code (and not use static), then singletons make it more bearable. You can make helper function to ease the syntax:

X("ClassA")->call();
X("ClassB")->call();

The X function should look up, create and return instance of a class.