Question

We have a huge Zend Framework project, it’s basically a website in 4 different languages and with a fair amount of pages. Usually my application handle 10~15 database tables and probably 5/6 controllers so I place all my model under applications/models.

The problem with that project doing the same would make copy the same models in each modules and probably make a lot of duplicate code and make the maintenance being difficult. I am wondering if it would wise to puts the models under library?

How do you people are doing in such case? some solutions, I am thinking of in my order of preference

• put models and shared code under /library
• make a common module and play with the auto loading to load this classes from any modules
• dirty but possible setup some symbolic links so the files in models come all from the same source … but probably bad

Answer 1

I keep all library code, including models, under /library. IMO, that’s what it’s there for. Then, if you need to share libraries (incl. models) between apps, you can do so with a single symlink or git submodule:

Your local app:

/myapp/application/
/myapp/public/
/myapp/library/
/myapp/library/MyApp/

Pulling in external dependencies:

/myapp/library/OtherLib (git submodule of a separate repo)
/myapp/library/ExtraLib (symlink to /path/to/ExtraLib/)

Or:

set_include_path(get_include_path() . ':/path/to/ExtraLib')

If you separate models from the library, you’d have two mount points for every dependency.