Brandon Savage has posted his latest article in his series looking at refactoring a piece of code (starting here) focusing in on the abstraction already in the code and how it can be made better.

This article will focus on the constructor method. There are a couple of problems, namely that the constructor itself does a lot of actual work. Also, we have the cURL setup done in the constructor. This object is a Twitter object, not a cURL object; this means that we should decouple the cURL functionality and abstract it into a separate object of its own.

He recommends splitting out the current method the class uses to create the cURL connection (setting it up in the constructor) and making a separate HTTP class that can be pulled in as an object and used as a sort of API. The full code of the new class is also included.