Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional, Third Edition

CHAPTER 6Object-Oriented PHP

While for many languages object orientation is simply a matter of course, it took several years before such features were incorporated into PHP. Yet the early forays into adding object-oriented features to the language were considered by many to be a poor attempt at best. Although the very basic premises of object-oriented programming (OOP) were offered in version 4, several deficiencies existed, including the following:

• An unorthodox object-referencing methodology
• No means for setting the scope (public, private, protected, abstract) of fields and methods
• No standard convention for naming constructors
• Absence of object destructors
• Lack of an object-cloning feature
• Lack of support for interfaces

Thankfully, version ...