Tuesday, 20 March 2007

Article: Work with Template Classes in PHP 5

Alejandro Gervasio, in the first article of a two part series introduces you to the basic concepts of the template classes. He says, template classes can be interesting within the vast area of pattern-oriented programming. Over the course of this series, he will demonstrate how to implement this design pattern with hands-on examples.

He says this pattern is unusual, particularly because the base template class has considerable control over how the respective subclasses must work.

He gives the following sections to explain the template classes:

• Creating a basic implementation of the template pattern: first he defines primarily two MySQL wrapping classes, which will be used for fetching database result sets.
• Building a simple template class: he builts a simple template class, in this section which will be responsible for setting up an algorithm for formatting these data sets.
• Completing the model imposed by the template pattern: in this section he derives only three subclasses from the base ‘ResultRemplate’ class. Each of them will be tasked with applying different (X)HTML formats to a given MySQL data set, he informs.
• Setting up a functional example: in this section he demonstrates how all the template classes that were built previously can be utilized in a pretty useful way.