Classes and objects

In recent years PHP has been turning more and more from a procedural language to an object-oriented one. Even though the fundamentals are still of procedural nature (in particular large parts of the standard library) most library code nowadays is developed in terms of classes and objects. This chapter covers the rather complex internals of PHP’s object orientation system.

Contents:

• Simple classes
  • Basic concepts
  • Class registration
  • Method definition and declaration
  • Properties and constants
  • Inheritance and interfaces
• Custom object storage
  • How are objects created?
  • Overriding create_object
  • Object store handlers
  • Interacting with the object store
• Implementing typed arrays
  • Array buffers and views
  • The ArrayBuffer
  • The buffer views
• Object handlers
  • An Overview
  • Implementing array access using object handlers
  • Honoring inheritance
  • Comparison of view objects
  • Debug information
• Iterators
  • The get_iterator handler
  • Iterator functions
  • Honoring inheritance
• Serialization
  • PHP’s serialization format
  • Serializing internal objects
  • Denying serialization
• Magic interfaces - Comparable
• Internal structures and implementation
  • Object properties
  • Object store