Question

Still on the PHP-OOP training wheels, this question may belong on failblog.org. =)

What are the benefits of method chaining in PHP?

I’m not sure if this is important, but I’ll be calling my method statically. e.g.

$foo = Bar::get('sysop')->set('admin')->render();

From what I’ve read, any method which returns $this is allowed to be chained. I just learned this is new in PHP5. Seems to me there may be speed benefits if I don’t have to instantiate a whole new object (calling it statically) and just select the few methods I need from the class?

Do I have that right?

Answer 1

There are no significant performance benefits to using either approach, especially on a production server with byte code cache.

Method chaining is just a shorter way of writing things. Compare with the longer version:

$foo = Bar::get('sysop');
$foo -> set('admin');
$foo -> render();

It does have some quirks, though: a typical IDE (such as Eclipse) can auto-complete your code in the longer version (as long as the type of $foo is known) but needs you to document the return type of all methods to work in the short version.