Question

I am new to object oriented programming and writing some of my first classes for a PHP application.

In some of the simpler classes, I declare a function __construct(), and inside of that function, call certain class methods. In some cases, I find myself instantiating the class in my app, and not needing to do anything with the resultant object because the class’s __construct() called the methods, which did their job, leaving me nothing left to do with the class.

This just doesn’t feel right to me. Seems goofy that I have a new object that I never do anything with.

Again, I’ll stress this is only the case for some of my more simple classes. In the more complicated ones, I do use class methods via the object and outside of __construct().

Do I need to rethink the way I coding things, or am I ok?

Answer 1

Well, the constructor is used to create a new instance of a class, and to do any necessary setup on that class. If you’re just creating the class and leaving it, that does seem a bit of a waste. Why not, for instance, use static functions in the class as an organizational tool and just call them(or a function that calls them) instead of constructing a new instance that you’ll never use?