Object-Oriented PHP

Summary of Changes

In this chapter, we've built upon the simple DirectoryItems class that was introduced in Chapter 4 to produce an expanded and upgraded class. As you've seen, you needed to make surprisingly few changes to this class in order to implement some of the key changes introduced with PHP 5.

Certainly, the changes described in this chapter are not the only changes to PHP's OO capabilities; however, one of them—the use of access modifiers—is possibly the most important. The single most glaring shortcoming of OO programming in PHP 4 is this lack of access modifiers. While disciplined use and careful documentation can take you part of the way toward mitigating this deficiency, it's much better to rely on the structure of the language ...