Richard Heyes wrote:
What design patterns do you usually use?
Whatever solves the problem. Factory is quite a common one. MVC is another.
I have a story to kind of touch on what Jochem said about you just don't
know the name yet.
Just recently I was tasked with creating a new in-house CRM for an
external partner. I only had four days and they had particular
requirements that ruled out Sugar or other things. I had never really
understood what the MVC pattern really was. I knew the basics, but I
just didn't "get it". After I finished the first wave of development on
this project I finally had a chance to sit back and see the forest
through the trees and sat back and thought "damn... I just used MVC."
If you're willing to shell out a few bucks, there's a pretty good book
on design patterns for PHP. http://www.phparch.com/c/books/id/0973589825
You can think of design patterns more like classes you use with your
code. They can help you achieve a goal, but they're not going to do
everything for you. Maybe an even better analogy would be a really
expensive set of knives. They're super sharp, so make sure you know
what you're doing with them before you use them.
There is also such a thing as too much. I heard a talk a while ago
about code maintainability. The speaker mentioned a co-worker of his
ran into his cube almost exhausted and proclaimed, "I finally did it!.
I used every one of the design patterns in my program!" Just a few
months later the speaker ended up being in charge of maintaining that
program, and it was a nightmare.
To make a long story short. I generally do what's easiest. It's
typically faster to develop and easier to maintain. Unnecessary
complexity can start a snowball effect.
--
Ray Hauge
www.primateapplications.com
--
PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
