I am using my own home grown PHP framework and it is heavily based on components mostly from pear and Zend but lately there are some better components coming up at Composer
As my apps are growing it becomes harder to switch between components, and I am wondering if there is a way I can design my programs differently. In a way that would allow me to use components like the opposite of abstract classes.
I am thinking there should be a way for me to create my own classes, which in turn just hook in to pear or zend and use those classes like as if they wore interfaces or abstract classes. Of course they would be doing the actual work and I would just link to them.
Hypothetically if I have been using pear Config/Lite, which can only work with ini and array files, and now I like to switch to pear config or Zend config to get the benefit of saving the data in a database then there should be an easy way to switch without changing all my code since what they implement is exactly the same thing.
I am asking because I been using pears Net/URL/Mapper, which isn’t bad but I found something that would also take care of the dispatching, and is being actively developed. Also I am sure that this kind of situation will come up again and again.
You want to look for something like the facade design pattern, or just use delegation / composition. However beware, using something like a facade can lead to a lot of unneeded complexity as you add layers of abstraction. I recommend you read some php design patterns, especially delegation / composition of objects to get a feel for how that might fit your case.