Learning PHP Design Patterns

Part V. MySQL and PHP Design Patterns

We must combine the toughness of the serpent with the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

—Immanuel Kant

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

—Edmund Burke

The Role of MySQL in PHP Design Patterns

While some very advanced MySQL programmers use design patterns with relational databases, the four chapters in Part V use PHP design patterns employed in conjunction with MySQL. The MySQL example code in Part V uses simple MySQL statements. So you need not brush up on your JOIN statements or any other relational database code used with MySQL and PHP in the following four chapters.

However, the use of MySQL is so ubiquitous with PHP that not having a section on using OOP structures and design patterns with MySQL would be a serious oversight. Besides, this last section provides a way to add some more design patterns in PHP. They include the following:

• Proxy

• Strategy

• Chain of Responsibility

• Observer

None of these patterns are the exclusive domain of a combined PHP−MySQL application, and the patterns can be used perfectly well with PHP on its own. Further, in one of the Chain of Responsibility examples, you can see how more than one design pattern can be used together ...