Autoloading for fun and profit
|
Posted on: July 27, 2010
So, as I stated in a previous
post, the code base here at dealnews is going through some
changes. ; I have been working heavily on those changes since
then. ; Testing and benchmarking to see what works best. One of
those changes is the heavy use of autoloading. ;
During the holidays, I always like to read the PHP Advent. ; One of the posts
this year was by Marcel
Esser titled You
Don’t Need All That. It was a great post and echos many
things I have said about PHP and web development. In his post,
Marcel benchmarks the difference between using an autoloader and
using straight require statements. I was not surprised by the
result. The autoloading overhead and class overhead is well known
to me. It is one thing that kept me from using any heavy OOP (we
banned classes on our user facing pages for a long time) in PHP 4
and PHP 5.0. It has gotten a lot better however. Class overhead is
very, very small now. Especially when using it as a namespacing for
static functions. However, there is one word of caution I would
like to add to his statements. When you use require/include
statements instead of autoloading, you end up with a file like
this:
require "DB.php";
require "Article.php";
function myfunc1() {
; ; ; ;DB::somemethod();
}
function myfunc2(){
; ; ; ;Article::somemethod();
}
?>That file needs to require two files, but each one is only
needed by one function in the file. ; This is the dilemma we
have found ourselves in. ; We have a file that is filled with
functions for building, taking apart, repairing, fetching, or
anything else you can think to do with a URL. So, at the top of
that file are 13 require statements. This all happened organically
over time. But, now we are in a situation where we load lots of
files that may not even be needed to begin with. By moving to an
autloading system, we will only include the code we need. This
saves cycles and file IO.
Again, Marcel's post was dead on. Our front end is written with
multiple entry points. ; We use auto_prepend files to do any
common work that all requests need (sessions, loading the
application settings, etc). ; The front page of dealnews.com is about 600 lines of PHP
that does the job as quickly as possible. But, we are moving it to
use autoloaded code because its require list has grown larger than
I would like and some of those requires are not always "required"
to generate the page.
One point Marcel did make was about how modern MVC systems are part
of the problem. We don't have a highly structured traditional MVC
layout of our code. We use a very wide, flat directory structure
rather than deep nesting of classes and objects. We also don't do a
lot of overloading. Maybe 1% of our classes extend another and
never more than one deep. All that makes for much quicker loading
objects vs. some of the packaged frameworks like Zend
Framework.
So, as Marcel warned, be aware of both your use of autoloading and
require statements. Both can be bad when used the wrong way.http://brian.moonspot.net/php-autoloading
Home
|
|
TagCloud: VB
&
????
CGI
Java
Know U'r TWEAK
GUI
Explorer
Perl
php
Blog
ATL
blogger
web server
??????Recent Posts
Augmented Reality Coming to DC Bus Stops Today (Photo)
Java - It's not Dead, Folks - It's Doing Just Fine
'NHL2K11' shoots, but sometimes misses
Hack of the Day: Use PHP's List Function to Quickly Transform Arrays to Variables
Web Design Basics - Do You Know the 5 Things Every Web Site Should Not Be Without?
links for 2010-09-04
IBM at the US Open - Analyzing Every Volley, Serve and Overhead Smash
SAP?'????RAC 11g R2 ????
Separating Apache logs by virtualhost with Lua
Web Design For Beginners
Categories
Web Technologies
Archives
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
Sponsors
Partners
|