Design - Consolidating my PHP files?

Question

My understanding is that "name".class.php is standard convention for creating classes in PHP, and consequently I have a separate file for each class. What I would like to do is consolidate my small php class hierarchy into one single file... say consolidated.class.php.

This will make it easier to upload/download to the server + if I need to run a simple textual search I don't have to look in more then one file. Additionally, I can remove include / require, since I'm essentially manually inserting them.

The question is, can I consolidate with out taking a performance hit?

EDIT/UPDATE

Much time later, I am using separate files and an autoloader. This should be more efficient, but of course, how much, is dependent upon the size of the files.

I think the development would be inefficient since you will be working in a large file full of code lines. — Nabeel, May 19 '11 at 22:00
not necesarilly. jQuery for example is split into multiple files, https://github.com/jquery/jquery/tree/master/src. It's at the build time when it becomes a single, large file. — Ionuț G. Stan, May 19 '11 at 22:21
Just to mention: The more modern naming convention is class `Vendor_Package_Component` (or `Vendor\Package\Component` when using namespaces) in file `Vendor/Package/Component.php`. Additional manually including is obsolete when using autoloading and every modern IDE can search/replace over directory structures. — KingCrunch, May 19 '11 at 22:46
javascript also has to travel over the network to get to your client. libraries try to do everything they can to minimize download size. — dqhendricks, May 19 '11 at 23:14
you can use this convention for autoloading, but I doubt this was the main reason. For example, Zend Framework follows the one class per file convention, but each file `require_once` its dependencies. — Ionuț G. Stan, May 20 '11 at 00:25

Ionuț G. Stan · Answer 1 · 2011-05-19T23:07:42.217

I believe it depends on the size of the project. You can start small, with everything in just a single file, then, as the code accumulates and you get a better understanding of the domain you're modelling, you can extract units into separate files.

The convention to use a class per file comes from the Java world. For years, PHP has tried to imitate Java, however, some of the practices are absurd. Like, you can't have functions, just classes, even if they're nothing more than a collection of static methods.

Here's an example of a web framework, called Konstrukt, that uses multiple units (classes/functions/constants) per file and seems to be doing well.

As @Nabeel said, you may hit a point where you'd have problems locating code if everything is inside a single big file. Judge by the project you're developing.

Regarding performance, you'd have to benchmark, as once again it depends on the project, but require/include incur some performance overhead due to file I/O. So it might be better that you have a single file loaded per request. The actual parsing might be faster than the system calls that look for the file to require.

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 19 '11 at 23:07

The reason people use the one class per file convention is for class autoloaders. This allows your script to automatically only load code that is actually being used by your script in that particular instance. If you load ALL of you classes every time a page loads, it's a fairly inneficient way to go.

For more information about class autoloaders:

http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.autoload.php

http://php.net/manual/en/function.spl-autoload-register.php

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 19 '11 at 22:07

I would advise you not to do this because everything a page gets viewed, every single one of your classes is loaded. When using only a few classes which are loaded everytime, it does indeed make no difference performance-wise, but if you have quite a lot of classes and you only use a handful, depending on the page being loaded, you add a huge overload to the page.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered May 19 '11 at 22:41

I don't want to say the same things like others (which is actually correct ^^) to bring u some new ideas.

I would create few functions to include/require my class files.

Example:

you have 2 php-files:

1: login.php

2: register.php

<?php
   // login.php
   include '../system/functions/myFunctions.php';  
   loadMyClasses(1);
?>

<?php
  // register.php
  include '../system/functions/myFunctions.php';
  loadMyClasses(2); 
?>

<?php
  //myFunctions.php

  DEFINE("CLASS_PATH", "../system/class/");      

  function loadMyClasses($type_id)
  {  
     //Example: Load in everytime. These files are always required.
     require_once CLASS_PATH.'class.database.php';
     require_once CLASS_PATH.'class.sql.php';

     if($type_id == 1)
     {
           require(CLASS_PATH.'class.security.php');
           require(CLASS_PATH.'class.cryptor.php');   
           require(CLASS_PATH.'class.login.php');   
     }

     if($type_id == 2)
     {
           require(CLASS_PATH.'class.security.php'); 
           require(CLASS_PATH.'class.register.php');  
     }
  }
?>

And this way you can simply change the path of the class or interface files. You have to make changes only in one file.

I Hope, I was able to help a bit!

Design - Consolidating my PHP files?

4 Answers4