I am sure that by now you must have heard that Drupal 8 is using Symfony components and is based on object-oriented programming in PHP. If you are a Drupal 7 developer, then you may not know what is object-oriented programming or fail to understand the benefits it offers. In this post, you will learn the basics of object-oriented PHP programming so that you can start developing for Drupal 8.
What is Object Oriented Programming?
The central concept in the undestanding of Object Oriented Programming is the concept of Object. An Object is a group of data (called properties) and functions (called methods) that go together. Let’s consider a real-life example. A vehicle is an object. It can be defined to have three properties: color, miles driven and warranty (number of miles). It can be defined to have one method: getWarrantyLeft(). This method returns the number of miles of warranty left on the vehicle. Let’s create a template for such a Vehicle object. Open a file Vehicle.php and write the following:
<?php
/**
* Vehicle class.
*/
class Vehicle {
// Color of the vehicle.
var $color = 'red'
// Miles driven.
var $milesDriven = 0;
// Warranty available.
var $warranty = 100000;
/**
* Returns miles of warranty left on the vehicle.
*
* @return int
* Miles of warrnty left on the vehicle.
*/
function getWarrantyLeft() {
if ($this->warranty - $this->milesDriven > 0) {
return ($this->warranty - $this->milesDriven);
}
return 0;
}
}
?>
Ignore the declaration $this in the code above for now. We’ll explain it later. What we have defined above is a template for a vehicle. Such a template is called Class. It’s not an object. The difference between Class and Object is similar to the difference between a person and you. Person is a common noun and there are billions of people roaming around in the world. On the other hand, there is only one of you. You have all the features of a person, but you are unique from every other person out there. If God were real and were to create another person, he’ll use the same Person template and create one more. That new person will still be different from you. In the same way, there will be multiple objects created from a class template. Your car and my truck, both are vehicles but they are different from each other. To create (or instantiate) an object from a class, you use new operator.
$yourCar = new Vehicle(); $myTruck = new Vehicle();
If you compare the variables $yourCar and $myTruck, you will get FALSE. Notice the operator ===. If you use == operator, you will see TRUE since == checks whether both the objects belong to the same class (which they do), but === checks whether the objects are identical or not.
// This will return FALSE. echo ($yourCar === $myTruck);
Now let’s check what the method getWarrantyLeft() returns. When you are writing procedural code, you can write the following code at the end of Vehicle.php and it will work:
echo getWarrantyLeft();
Now run this file using the command: php Vehicle.php
You will see the output:
$ php Vehicle.php Warranty left on your car: 100000 Warranty left on my truck: 100000
You are seeing the value 100000 because we have defined $warranty to be 100000 in the declaration on line 15 of Vehicle.php and $milesDriven to be 0 on line 12. As a result, 100000 miles of warranty is still left on both the vehicles.
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