We are calling for developers who would like to join in on a fun object oriented PHP 5 ecommerce project entitle ooCommerce. Please email me or leave a comment if you would like to be a developer on this project or help in any way. The project is hosted at SourceForge and currently only has downloads for the template system it will be using, Arras Template. Arras Template has a website at www.arrastemplate.org.

We (actually just myself right now) hope for this to be a good learning experience for others and are blogging about our design decisions how we are putting it together along the way. This way it can be more of a case study in progress for others to learn in a more of hands-on way about object oriented programming.

Anyone is invited to help out, whether they know object oriented programming or not. If OOP isn’t a strong point, then you can just help coding (with guidance if desired). If it is a strong point, then you can help in the design process as well and post some blog posts too. I can do the design, database, classes, and all, but it would be a better project with more minds at work on it. It will also be finished sometime this century. Thank you for your help.

We’ve broken down our system down into some general parts already. Now it’s time to make some decisions on more specific pieces of ooCommerce and break the system down into some main objects.

So, we’re going to build an ecommerce solution, an open source one. What pieces are involved? What are the major components of the system? Let’s get this organized using a top down approach.

In writing the articles on object oriented programming I have stuck with theory. After all, it is not language specific and takes less space to say what there is to say. However, I have been asked by serveral to provide a tutorial or include examples on object oriented code. Well, I’ve decided to do almost that.

In PHP 5 and greater there is a magic function called __autoload (note: two underscores). __autoload allows us to load a class on the fly so to speak. It only gets called when a class can not be found, then it has a chance to load the class. If the class still can not be found, you get your regular error stating so. __autoload can be really useful if all of your classes happen to be in one directory, but what happens if you are managing a large project with many packages of classes? We will look at some different options.

One of the simple and very useful pieces of code in Pherret (a PHP 5 framework) is the setProperties() function in the base Object class. The name originally came from Java Beans and works in a similar manner. I’m sharing it because it could be used in any code with PHP 5 or PHP 4.