Namespacing and Autoloading in Php
Recently, I have to revisit PHP because of a new project and I realized that namespace is totally new for me. So I thought it’ll be good to write down a quick note. This post will go quickly on how namespacing and autoloading work in PHP by using Composer.
###Our Application
Our application is just a simple page echoing some text using json_encode method.
Let’s create a index.php and write all our codes inside.
<?php
class Team {
protected $members = [];
public $name;
public function __construct($name, $members = [])
{
$this->name = $name;
$this->members = $members;
}
public function add(Person $person)
{
$this->members[] = $person;
}
public function members()
{
return $this->members;
}
}
class Person {
public $name, $role;
public function __construct($name, $role)
{
$this->name = $name;
$this->role = $role;
}
}
$kobebryant = new Person('Kobe Bryant', 'player');
$Lakers = new Team('Lakers', [$kobebryant] );
// add player and coach
$jeremylin = new Person('Jeremy Lin', 'player');
$Lakers->add($jeremylin);
$byronscott = new Person('Byron Scott', 'coach');
$Lakers->add($byronscott);
// output
echo(json_encode($Lakers->members()));
If we execute this file (either start a server by php -s localhost:8000 or php index.php), we will see an array with 3 objects inside.
[
{"name":"Kobe Bryant","role":"player"},
{"name":"Jeremy Lin","role":"player"},
{"name":"Byron Scott","role":"coach"}
]
Cool app right? Let’s explore namespacing and composer autoloading by rewritting this app.
###Breaking Down Classes
If we keep expanding our application, this index.php will become very large. This makes our code hard to read and maintain. So let’s give each class their own files located inside src/ directory.
├── index.php
└── src
├── Person.php
└── Team.php
PHP won’t know the files inside src/ directory if we do not tell it. There are a few methods to do so, one of them is we can use require method to load the needed files but there’s a better way to solve this - composer autoloading. (I assume composer is installed on your system). First to initialize composer, all we need is composer.json.
//composer.json
{}
Put this on project root and run composer install will create a new directory - vendor. This is the place where composer stores our project autoload configuration and dependencies. To make use of composer autoload, we’ll modify our composer.json.
{
"autoload": {
"psr-4": {
"NBA\\": "src"
}
}
}
Here, composer will register a PSR-4 autoloader for NBA namespace (can be any name related to our app). Now our new namespace is mapped to src/ directory.
###Adding Namespaces
In our codes containing classes, let’s give them their own namespace.
// src/Person.php
<?php
namespace NBA\Person
...
// src/Team.php
<?php
namespace NBA\Team
...
Noticed in PHP, namespaces are required to named relatively to their paths. If Person.php is located inside src/other/Person.php, we do this:
namespace NBA\other\Person
Autoloading
In our index.php, we need to load autoload.php provided from composer. Also to use the namespace we just declared, we use the keyword use.
Let’s break our index.php down to separate some concerns. Our application logic will be placed in app.php.
//index.php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
require 'app.php';
// app.php
<?php
use NBA\Person;
use NBA\Team;
$kobebryant = new Person('Kobe Bryant', 'player');
$Lakers = new Team('Lakers', [$kobebryant] );
// add player and coach
$jeremylin = new Person('Jeremy Lin', 'player');
$Lakers->add($jeremylin);
$byronscott = new Person('Byron Scott', 'coach');
$Lakers->add($byronscott);
// output
echo(json_encode($Lakers->members()));
By executing php index.php, we should get the same results.
[
{"name":"Kobe Bryant","role":"player"},
{"name":"Jeremy Lin","role":"player"},
{"name":"Byron Scott","role":"coach"}
]
###Resources