The ticket is located at http://tracker.phpbb.com/browse/PHPBB3-9682
The proposed patch can be found at http://github.com/naderman/phpbb3/compa ... to-loading
Since we are going to use object orientation a lot more, we naturally have more class definitions, which will not always need to be loaded. Autoloading provides a simple yet sufficiently efficient mechanism to avoid many conditional file inclusions. They also avoid the (unecessary) call to a class loading function. To use autoloading a convention for naming class needs to be established.
I propose that phpBB class name lookups follow these rules:
- All classes are prefixed with phpbb_
- All classes reside in includes/ or a subdirectory thereof
- Directories must not contain underscores
- The class name is separated into parts by underscores, the parts are checked from first to last, until one is found which is not a directory, all remaining parts make up the file name. If no parts are left, the last directory name is used.
Examples:
- Code: Select all
directory structure:
includes/
class_name.php
dir/
class_name.php
dir.php
subdir/
class_name.php
lookups:
- Code: Select all
phpbb_class_name -> includes/class_name.php
phpbb_dir_class_name -> includes/dir/class_name.php
phpbb_dir -> includes/dir/dir.php
phpbb_dir_subdir_class_name -> includes/dir/subdir/class_name.php
Optionally the class loader can be supplied with a cache instance, either in the constructor or via set_cache() at a later time. This allows for the lookups to be cached, so the directories do not have to be traveresed on every request. This makes it necessary for the cache and its dependency to continue to be loaded the old way - without autoloading.
Code will not be changed to use autoloading, but it will rather only be used for new classes where applicable.
