In a continuation of their "wishlist" series of posts for PHP6, Stephan Schmidt has postted this new item today taking about something he wishes PHP could do - initialize a property when defining an object.

But how could this be solved, when you never create an instance of Foo but only use static method calls?

I propose a new feature, we implemented in the Stubbles class loader and has been shamelessly ripped from the XP framework. If you need to initialize some properties with objects and are developing with Stubbles, you only need to implement a method called __static() in your class. If your class is loaded by the Stubbles class loader, it will check, whether this method has been implemented and call it. As every class is only loaded once, this enables you to add code to your class, that is also only executed once, if the class is imported into your application.

His solution allows for the creation of such objects with little more than the use of a __static call that could get the object and change the property defined on it.

In a continuation of their "wishlist" series of posts for PHP6, Stephan Schmidt has postted this new item today taking about something he wishes PHP could do - initialize a property when defining an object.

But how could this be solved, when you never create an instance of Foo but only use static method calls?

I propose a new feature, we implemented in the Stubbles class loader and has been shamelessly ripped from the XP framework. If you need to initialize some properties with objects and are developing with Stubbles, you only need to implement a method called __static() in your class. If your class is loaded by the Stubbles class loader, it will check, whether this method has been implemented and call it. As every class is only loaded once, this enables you to add code to your class, that is also only executed once, if the class is imported into your application.

His solution allows for the creation of such objects with little more than the use of a __static call that could get the object and change the property defined on it.