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Can Oop Copy The Procedural Style From This And Other Books?


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Hello Larry,

 

Thank you for all your help, I learned many things reading your books and now I am back to the desk for learning after many hours of producing. You were right that a programmer may have a very nice life doing procedural programming and I have to say that I finished a quite big project and I didn't mind 'repeating myself' as in fact was not that bad, put things in functions and the repeating part was rather easy: copy/paste and changing a few things. I like the fact that I can keep things separate, HTML, SQL, PHP, CSS. Anyway... I've got so used with your way and the patterns I learned from book that now I have a question related OOP.

 

Is it a mistake if I use the same structure, for example the "configuration" file and the "connection" file and simply rewrite in oop syntax? Especially the database connection file that usually in frameworks does not stay outside the "http" folder.

 

if I do write, let's say, a validation class for forms and for some project this is all that I need, is it a mistake that I do not create a CRUD class and other things like a framework has? I know it sounds like reinventing the wheel, but it is not quite like that. An existing framework has a lot of things that are useless to small projects and require maintenance that small projects do not necessary need. Why should I have the forms, for example, generated from PHP when, maybe, as part as my workflow, I prefer have them in HTML, so I can see them and work visually, like in Dreamweaver. I guess many with a background in design and not in programming would prefer it this way.

 

Let's take for example Dreamweaver, it has some basic things that can do "programming for poets" and it is really fast, but it lacks a server side validation script. A simple validation class to resolve this issue will resolve a lot of problems and speed up the development. Will this be a bad thing ("unprofessional")?

 

I look at your "Shopping Cart Widget" class in the book. You do not actually create a very general class and extend it afterwards in a framework style. It performs pretty particular things and probably can be abstracted more (a guess). Is that example just for study (as it compares with the procedural code before) or it may really be a production piece of code? If you add, let's say, real time quotes from Fedex, is it necessary to write a class "ShippingClass" than extend it with "ShippingFedexClass" when, assuming it is possible, writting just a functio in your Shopping Cart Widget class may provide shipping quotes?

 

Bottom line, if we do not have very abstractizied classes for everything and keep things separate (things like forms, I believe this is a very good example), is this a mistake? Is it possible to have the best of both worlds?

 

Thank you,

Greg

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Short answer; Yes. Frameworks are very generalized for obvious reasons, and you would not code everything the same way yourself. The important thing is finding the balance between an abstract and case-specific solution. Taking your FedEx-example, I would code just that. However, if the FedEx class uses very general functionality in some cases, you may want to generalize that part alone.

 

Very good, modular procedural code can be pretty similar to object oriented classes. You are right on that. I think you should read a little bit about class design. Like with databases, there are ways to plan your class hierarchies before you implement them. Learning a little about UML design will take you a long way

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