http://twitter.com/grodger

In this post i’m going to focus on one of the smaller and more overlooked features, the improved static method/property access.

So to start let’s create a basic static class:

class product {
	public static $name;
	public static $colour;
	public static $price;
 
	public static function getColour() {
		$tmp_colour = 'The colour is: ' . self::$colour;
		return $tmp_colour;
	}
}

To access the properties and methods of this class prior to PHP 5.3 we’d do the following:

// Prior to PHP 5.3
print product::$name;
print product::$price;
print product::getColour();

Now the beauty of the feature in PHP 5.3 is that you can abstract the name of the class when referencing the static methods and properties:

// PHP 5.3
$prod_class = 'product';
print $prod_class::$name;
print $prod_class::$price;
print $prod_class::getColour();

See the benefit yet? If you need to switch in a new class with a new name it’s a three line change in the first code segment due to the hardcoded class name, whereas in the second segment it’s a one line change.

Scale this to a larger project with multiple static classes and lot’s of calls and it’s a nice little bit of abstraction.

There’s more to come on the PHP 5.3 update in future posts so stay tuned!

Kind regards,

Gareth Rodger