Question

I am creating some reusable objects in php, and I wanted to know whats the best way to build them. Below I have 2 examples of different ways of doing this.

Class Uploader{
    public $Filename;
    public $Directory;

    function upload(){
        upload_file($this->Filename, $this->Directory)
    }
}

// Then use the class above like this.
$u = new Uploader;
$u->Filename = 'foo.png'; // Set all the props
$u->Directory = 'bar/'    //  ^   ^   ^    ^
$u->upload();             // Then Execute

Or would it be better to do this…

Class Uploader {
    function uploader($filename, $directory){
        upload_file($filename, $directory)
    }
}

// Then use the class above like this.
$u = new Uploader;
$u->uploader('foo.png', 'bar/') // Obviously much less code, All in One.

Out of these two methods, which one is preferred, is their a speed difference or any sort of gain of using one over the other?
I favour example #1, but is their a best practice to this?

Answer 1

Why can’t you do both?

class Uploader
{
  public
    $filename,
    $directory;

  public function __construct( $name = '', $dir = '', $autoUpload = false )
  {
    $this->filename = $name;
    $this->directory = $dir;
    if ( $autoUpload )
    {
      $this->upload()
    }
  }

  public function upload()
  {
    //check your values
    ...code...
    upload_file( $this->filename, $this->directory );
  }
}

With this technique, you could automatically upload a file simply with:

$uploader = new Uploader( $name, $dir, true);

or you could manually construct the object with:

$uploader = new Uploader();
$uploader->filename = $name;
$uploader->directory = $dir;
$uploader->upload();