NYCPHP Meetup

[Allen Shaw]

Derek's question (balancing the value and trouble of creating accessor 
functions for each variable) did not *exactly* match the topic of the 
article he mentioned: deciding on the design-wisdom of accessor 
functions in general, assuming that they often have the effect of 
allowing other code to meddle in what is "really" the business of the 
class.

The article says:

> My experience is that maintainability is inversely proportionate to 
> the amount of data that moves between objects. Though you might not 
> see how yet, you can actually eliminate most of this data movement.
>
> By designing carefully and focusing on what you must do rather than 
> how you'll do it, you eliminate the vast majority of getter/setter 
> methods in your program. /Don't ask for the information you need to do 
> the work; ask the object that has the information to do the work for you./
>
Seems to me he has a point, and as a novice programmer I'm persuaded to 
try and avoid reading/manipulating class properties as much as possible 
and write the class do whatever the calling code might be doing with 
that property. Did anyone read the article and want to comment on it?

- Allen

Derek DeVries wrote:

>For every object that I create I end up making countless getter/setter
>methods. My User class is littered with methods like getUsername(),
>getEmail(), etc. This can add up to thousands of lines of code for my
>objects. Is there a better way around this? A method like this would
>cut down on code:
>
>/**
> * Get the value of the given property.
> *  eg. $username = $user->get('username');
> * @param   string  $var    Name of the property
> * @return  mixed
> */
>function get($var)
>{
>    return isset($this->{$var}) ? $this->{$var} : null;
>}
>
>However this would allow for access to any of the properties, which I
>don't necessarily want. Has anyone tried using the above approach to
>success/failure? I suppose another approach would be to make all of
>the accessable properties in an associative array. I am aware of
>php5's __get/__set magic methods but am currently still using v4. I
>like the idea of having the specific getX()/setX() methods in my API
>because it seems clearer for others to read. However I feel that I'm
>writing a lot of unnecessary code.
>
>I've run into this article titled: Why getter and setter methods are
>evil. http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-09-2003/jw-0905-toolbox.html
>
>This is a java article that advocates eliminating accessors. I'm not
>sure if I want to go to that extreme, but I guess there are a few good
>points.
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>  
>

-- 
===========================================================
Allen Shaw                                  ashaw at iifwp.org
IIFWP Data and                           914.631.1331 x.106
    IT Services                        http://www.iifwp.org

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