Keith's Weblog: Comments on "Mixins in PHP (Or, I hate PHP volume 2)"

by Harry Fuecks

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 09:01:48 +0000

To an extent there's an alternative in Class kit: http://pecl.php.net/package/classkit - not quite the same but almost - of course you've got to compile it yourself. You might also get some mileage out of the _get(), set() and _call() "magic" methods

But agree - think object aggregation was a useful tool that should be restored. There's other buzz words it would make possible like AOP and Metaclasses.

The PHP 4.3.x implementation was good, IMO, as it encouraged use only for exceptional situations, rather than as an alterative to the current inheritance mechanism. So no ones going to go wild with multiple inheritance, which seems to be the "fear" that had it removed.

Some other people with thoughts in the same area;

http://jaxn.phpenterprise.net/blog/archi...Programming-is-Important-for-PHP.html
http://jaxn.phpenterprise.net/blog/archives/419-More-on-Aspect-Oriented-PHP.html
http://www.futuraworkz.com/index.php?p=8

by Keith Gaughan

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 22:03:20 +0000

OTOH, classes just suck anyway. Prototypes Abú!

by 83.30.198.249

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 14:16:51 +0000

Looks like I am not alone in thinking that the newer php version we have the more limits we have: http://blog.gosu.pl/comments.php?id_news=7

by Joe Cheng

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 00:04:36 +0000

Can't you use PHP 5 delegates to fake mixins?

http://www.zend.com/zend/php5/php5-delegation.php

It all comes down to message passing, after all...

by Keith

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 20:41:20 +0000

Thanks for the link, Joe.

This doesn't do exactly what I want, but it's close. Unfortunately, it doesn't work under both PHP 4 and 5, so I have to program it the brain-dead way anyway if I want it to work under both. Though maybe I could do something to use object aggregation under PHP 4 and delegation under PHP 5.

However, it still enforces an artificial separation between the two since I can't do things like access the first class' instance variables from the delegated class through $this, but that's not such a big deal. Though, this is all probably much less efficient than the PHP 4 object aggregation feature since it involves temporary objects and lots of indirection.

Oh yeah, and I'm a huge fan of prototype-based object systems.