What are the benefits of OO programming? Will it help me write better code? [closed]

Answer 1

Objects help encapsulate complexity. For most PHP programming, it's impossible to write good, clean code for any reasonably complicated application. Writing OO PHP helps you put that code into its own box, isolating it from everything else. This has several benefits.

1. As long as your object has clearly defined inputs and outputs, the way that the object does what it does doesn't matter at all - storing/retrieving data could go from flat file to XML to memcache to MySQL to Oracle, and you only ever have to concern yourself with one single object.
2. As long as your object has clearly defined inputs and outputs, you can completely replace it with another object that has the same inputs/outputs. Decide at runtime whether you want MySQL, Postgres, memcached, or HTTP POST/GET requests to a sketchy server in Indonesia.
3. OO makes unit testing easier. If you can define what a specific object should do (i.e what results it should give you for a given input) then you can easily write code to test thousands of values against that code and check the results, and you'll know instantly if something breaks.
4. The more of your code you 'hide' in objects, the less of it you have to see when you're using that functionality. I wrote a polling application once in PHP that handled all aspects of polling - database interaction, poll generation, voting, ranking, sorting, and displaying - and I only needed one line of code on my website (Poll::Display()) to implement the entirety of what the app could do - which made maintaining my homepage far easier.

Keep one thing in mind - OO in PHP (even PHP5) isn't very good OO compared to a language like Python or Ruby. The everything-is-an-object model in Python is what made me OO programming really click for me - and as a former PHP programmer (and doubly-certified Zend engineer), I strongly recommend exploring Python's OO if you want to understand what OO is all about. It will help you write better PHP code, at the very least.

Answer 2

I'm a long-time procedural PHP programmer who occasionally dabbles in object oriented PHP. Joel's answer above is an excellent summary of the benefits. In my opinion, a subtle secondary benefit, is that it forces you to better define your requirements from the start. You have to understand the relationships between the objects and the methods that will be acting upon them.

A good book to help with the transition is Peter Lavin's "Object-Oriented PHP".

Answer 3

A large system, such as Wordpress, Drupal, or XOOPS, uses OOP concepts. You can see the benefits of their use there. Code reuse, modularity, maintainability, and extensibility.

You have the ability to modify parts of objects and it affects the entire application; no searching to replace every spot you did some operation (and possibly missing it).

You can reuse objects all over, saving an awful lot of copying and pasting. Patching a bug requires patching the one object, not 16 pages of code that all do the same thing.

When you encapsulate the logic and "hide" the implementation, it's easier to use the objects, both for you 6 months from now when you've forgotten why you did something, and for the nest guy or gal who uses your code. For example, all you do to loop through posts in Wordpress is call a function. I don't need to know how it works, I only need to know how to call it.

OOP is really procedural code wrapped in object methods/functions. You do still need to know how to write decent linear code in order to implement methods and functions of objects. It just makes it far easier to reuse, scale, fix, debug, and maintain your things.

Answer 4

I would say there are two primary benefits:

• Encapsulation: code in libraries that shouldn't be called from outside the library can be hidden, preventing misuse, and easing changes to the internal structure of the library while preserving the external interface. In a good OO design, changes are introduced more easily once the code is complete.
• Abstraction: instead of dealing with arrays of arrays you're dealing with employees, departments, and so on. This means you can focus on the business logic, and write fewer lines of code. Fewer lines means fewer bugs.

Reuse I wouldn't strictly qualify as an OO benefit, because in a purely procedural model smart library organization lets you reuse code as well.

On the other hand, using lots of objects in PHP tends to decrease performance compared to a procedural model, because there is too much object construction overhead for every request. Finding a good balance between procedural-style and oo-style code is imperative.

Answer 5

One thing no one has mentioned is that OO code facilitates writing readable code:

sherry.changePhoneNumber();
phoneCompany.assignNewPhoneNumberTo(sherry);
sherry.receive(new PhoneNumber().withAreaCode("555").withNumber("194-2677"));

I get a strange satisfaction from such aesthetics.

Answer 6

There was a time, back when i first started programming, that i wrote user-oriented code. It worked great, but was hard to maintain.

Then, i learned OO, and the code i wrote become easier to maintain, easier to share between projects, and life was good... for everyone except my users.

Now, i know the true silver bullet of computer programming. I write OO code, but first i objectify my users. Treating people as objects may seem rude at first, but it makes everything much more elegant - you get to write all of your software to work with clearly-defined interfaces, and when a user sends an unexpected message you can merely ignore it, or, if marked with a flag signifying sufficient importance, throw an exception at them.

Life, with OO, is good...