In this new post to his blog Timothy Boronczyk has a few suggestions about what's wrong with the current implementation of object oriented programming in most languages (including PHP).

Proponents of Object Oriented Programming feel the paradigm yields code that is better organized, easier to understand and maintain, and reusable. [...] If objects truly model the way people think of things in the real world, then why do people have a hard time understanding and working in OOP? I suspect the problem might be the focus on objects instead of actions.

He goes on to explain that, in his opinion, the functionality would be more understandable if it focused on the actions from the user's point of view rather than what the object itself can do.

The way some OOP languages (like Java and C#) force objects on the programmer borders on the absurd. [...] Sadly though, that decision isn't left to the programmer who has been tasked with developing and maintaining a system.

If you're a PHP developer and haven't made the jump to object-oriented programming yet, you definitely need to check out this extensive tutorial from thewebsqueeze.com. It's packed with plenty of OOP and wants to teach it all to you.

This tutorial aims to remove some of the curly-brace-filled haze that often surrounds OOP and by the end of this lesson you will have created a class, instantiated an object, given inheritance to some children and come to understand why OOP is such a powerful tool to have at your disposal. If you have no idea what any of the above means but are shaking with a desire to find out, read on as we look at Abstraction for the rest of us.

They work from the ground up - defining classes, setting properties with visibility, adding methods and a constructor, extending classes and using static methods/variables. They haven't updated it with the new namespace operator ("\" instead of "::") but other than that, it's a great overview. There's even some type checking and input filtering to round out the code examples.

The IBM developerWorks website has a few suggestions - seven of them, in fact - that they think can help make you a better PHP programmer.

With PHP's object-oriented (OO) language features, if you aren't already creating your applications with OO principles in mind, these seven habits will help you get started in the transition between procedural programming and OO programming.

Each of the seven OOP habits have more details below them, but here's the short list:

• Be modest.
• Be a good neighbor.
• Avoid looking at Medusa.
• Embrace the weakest link.
• You're rubber; I'm glue.
• Keep it in the family.
• Think in patterns.

In each there's a "bad habit" and a "good habit" to explain the concept a bit more fully, everything from error handling to interfaces.

PHPFreaks has posted part one and part two of a new series they're working on to introduce those new to the language to the concepts of object-oriented programming in PHP.

On the old site, I started a series of tutorials named "PHP Application Design". I planned for at least three parts, and while I did publish the first two and wrote at least half of part three, I found myself out of time to make it to the finish. Still dedicated to writing reusable and extensible PHP code and spreading the knowledge, this is a restart of the series, renamed as simply "OO PHP"

In part one he looks at the basics of OOP (terms, defining properties/methods, autoload, exceptions, type hinting, etc) with some code examples sprinkled through out. Part two looks at the "boring OOP principles" like polymorphism, encapsulation and heuristics.

Stefan Mischook has released a Spanish version of his tutorial covering object-oriented programming in PHP.

I've released my tutorial on Object Oriented PHP in Spanish. You can download the PDF. Many thanks to Javier W. Barbieri from Iquitos Peru.

Check out the KillerPHP.com site for more great tutorials - including videos - released to learning PHP.

In a continuing series of videos, Stefan Mischook has posted the last video discussing theory for object-oriented programming with PHP today.

I've released a new video that basically covers the content covered in the PDF: Classes and Objects. It is the last bit object oriented PHP theory before we jump in and start writing actual PHP code.

The video only runs about five minutes and covers the items from the PDF - a lot of the basics you'll need to know before getting into programming with objects and classes in PHP.

Stefan Mischook has taken the time to come up with some new video tutorials for PHP covering an introduction to and the use of object oriented programming in your PHP applications.

With the release of php5 (in 2004,) php programmers finally had the power to code with the 'big boys'. Like Java and C#, php finally had a complete OOP infrastructure. In these videos, you will be guided (step-by-step) through the process of building and working with objects using php's built-in OOP capabilities

There's two videos currently:

• Introduction to Object Oriented PHP
• Why learn Object Oriented PHP

As well as a PDF file to accompany the "Why OOP?" video for more reference information.

From the PHP in Action blog today, there's a new post that (briefly) shows how to run your tests directly from a popular unix text editor - vim.

I created my own test runner to run tests inside Vim, I can't remember how long ago. Must be a year or two. I never shared it with the world. It was too primitive for anyone else to use. Then, recently, I decided to try re-implementing it in a more serious way.

The "more serious way" meant using Vim script to its full potential, including the ability to work with objects and already has its own testing framework. He includes a screenshot but no download just yet. It looks promising and makes running tests as simple as hitting F11 and watching it go.

On the ITJungle website, there's a new article about an award presented to Independent Computer Services for their OOP development efforts.

One of the attractions to PHP on System i is the low skills barrier to entry. Anybody who has written a lick of procedural PHP on any other platform can develop System i applications. But one of the lesser known advantages of PHP is its capability to scale up into the realm of object-oriented (OO) development to create more sophisticated applications. OO development was the basis for an award given to System i consultancy Independent Computer Services (ICS) by Zend, the company behind PHP.

The article goes on to talk about who ICS is, what they do in the technology market, why they chose PHP and what they developed to deserve the award.

Matthew Weir O'Phinney has two new posts that talk about something object-oriented developers seem to shy away from - globals in their classes and how they can make things more difficult to make "embeddable applications" a reality.

In my previous entry, I ranted about the use of globals in popular PHP applications, and how they make embedding said applications difficult. I develop using object-oriented practices, and can honestly say I can't recall ever having slung a global variable around in my own code. Globals seem hackish to me, and as a result, trying to get applications that use them to behave correctly has been a challenge.

In the first part, he notes an interesting find about the $GLOBALS value and illustrates with a code example how he was able to get around it in his instance (wrapping a Serendipity instance in a Zend Framework app).

In part two, though, and uses another code example to show what kind of issues he was seeing with the $GLOBALS - a script that sets some globals in different instances and echoes the results back out.