Chapter 5: Collection Class

Overview

Now that you've learned the ins and outs of object-oriented application design in PHP, you might be tempted to dive in and start coding your application. With your new-found knowledge, you're certainly ready to do just that, but you will almost certainly be taking the longest route to get there. There are a number of shortcuts you can take along the way, in the form of a series of utilities and reusable classes that together will comprise an immensely powerful, easy-to-use development toolkit. In this part of the book, we'll be introducing you to the toolkit piece by piece, and showing you with real-world examples just how useful it can be. The first class in your toolkit is called Collection, and that's what you'll meet in this chapter.

The Collection class is an object-oriented replacement for the traditional array data type. Much as an array does, it contains member variables, although those variables tend to be other objects, rather than simpler data types like strings, integers, and so forth. The class then provides simple methods to allow you to add member variables, remove them, and fetch them for use in applications. As you'll see in this chapter, it has numerous advantages over using a simple array for storing a series of instantiated objects.

As with all chapters in this section of the book, you will not only utilize the code for the class itself, but will also see exactly how it is put together, based on original design requirements which we will determine together. Along the way, topics such as lazy instantiation using callbacks are discussed, as well as how to put the Collection class to use and what possible improvements could be made to it in the future.

In conjunction with the CollectionIterator class, covered in the next chapter, the Collection class provides a sophisticated but easy-to-implement mechanism for handling groups of objects in your application.