Question

so I know that in Zend Framework if your function name follows certain path convention, eg. Path_To_Function::function() when the function is located in path/to/function (or something to this nature), ZF will automatically include the required file in that location

but that’s not what I do….what I do is basically put all the places where I want to include into the php include_path and then just require the file and then call the function.

like the following

require_once('Class.php');
Class::something();

whereby Class.php is inside a directory within the include_path

but then this is redundant since I’m already specifying the class name in the static function call Class::something() and virtually all my functions are static…

is there a way to configure/hack zend so that if I make a static call:

SomeClass::dosomething(); 

it will automatically execute require_once('SomeClass.php') based on that static call’s class name?

Answer 1

Put this in your Bootstrap class

protected function _initAutoloader()
{
    $autoloader = Zend_Loader_Autoloader::getInstance();
    $autoloader->setFallbackAutoloader(true);
    return $autoloader;
}

See http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.loader.autoloader.html#zend.loader.autoloader.usage

Really, you should be namespacing your classes as this not only makes autoloading easier, but prevents possible conflicts, eg

// library/My/Class.php
class My_Class { // ...

// library/My/SomeClass.php
class My_SomeClass { // ...

then you just add the namespace prefixes to the autoloader in your application config

autoloadernamespaces.My = "My_"