Question

I’m new to OOP using PHP and the idea seems a little pointless in some ways. In non-webbased languages the object lives through-out the life of the program (from execution to exit). In this situation it make perfect sense because you build the class then initialize it at run-time where you can access it frequently as needed there after. However with web programming since the execution of an application might happen in many stages (page loads) the life of the object could end up being only a small portion of the time an application is being run. So it seems to me that the only option to keep objects alive during the course of the application’s usage would be to store that object after initialization in a session variable. Is this common practice or are there other means by which to utilize the power of OOP in PHP more effectively?

Answer 1

PHP’s website has an article that deals specifically with this: Serializing objects – objects in sessions. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with serialize objects in your session but as this article suggests:

It is strongly recommended that if an
application serializes objects, for
use later in the application, that the
application include the class
definition for that object throughout
the application. Not doing so might
result in an object being unserialized
without a class definition…