Question

I’m working with a number of ‘helper’ classes, which affectively have a bunch of static functions which allow the controllers and actions have access to chunks of shared functionality.

Problem is that these files have been used as a dumping ground for any functionality which is required across the modules/application and as a result they are > 3k lines in size and at the top they’ve got about 50 require_once declarations!

Obviously if a view in the application wan’t to use a small part of the functionality available from these helpers it inherits all the required files, and you end up bloating your app.

If I were to include the files on a per need basis, I could end up making numerous require_once calls to the required files, which has it’s own overhead (compounded with frequency), when I need use a large amount of the functionality available from these helper files.

So essentially my question is where is the balance struck and is there a best practice that one can employ?

Thanks,

Flunga

Answer 1

Take a look at the autoloading feature. this will reduce all your includes down to only what is required, when it is required.