Dynamically Add Functions to PHP Classes
I’m in the process of working on the new version of my PHP Thumbnailer class, and came across a couple of interesting challenges. I’ve gotten a lot of great suggestions for features, and have wanted to add them, but at the same time don’t as I would prefer not to bloat the class with all sorts of functionality. So I started thinking about how I could provide certain functionality for people that want it, without either simply making it a part of the class (and making it more bloated as a result), or coming up with all sorts of extended classes to maintain and distribute. The other thing I don’t want to do is end up creating an app… I want this thing to be a small library. Finally, I want people to be able to integrate the library / classes into their existing apps as easily as possible. The solution (or paradigm I suppose) that jumped out was plugins. Ah, but how does one create plugins for classes? Rather, how do you dynamically add functions to PHP classes? Well, after some googling and tinkering, I think I’ve come up with the solution. Read on to see how it’s done… Read the rest of this entry »
