Question

I am writing helper classes for a large project in PHP and I have written a class called Command. It is essentially an OOP wrapper around running system commands from PHP in a controlled way. It has methods like addOption() to add -a type options and addArgument() to add other arguments.

I will need to do a lot of scp’ing of files around so I will be using the Command class a lot. The calls to scp are very specific in that I need certain options used every time.

Does it make sense to extend this class and create a ScpCommand class? It seems to have an ‘is a’ relationship, but it is really just the same thing as the Command class with specific options every time. I don’t really think I would need to override any methods with the exception of the constructor. I probably would add just class variables. It would really just be a convenience.

What makes the most sense here?

Answer 1

If it is just configuration, why not consider a factory which returns a Command after doing your boiler-plate configuration for you?

function getScpCommand($???)  {     $Command = new Command();     $Command->addOption(/* scp specific this */);     $Command->addArgument(/* scp specific that */);     /* etc */     $Command->addOption(/* handle your getScpCommand parameters here */)      return $Command; }