Question

While I understand the $this variable is not available when a method is called in a static context, to assist in decoupling my application components from one-another I figured it would make sense to call static methods from an instance. For example:

class MyExample{
    private static $_data = array();
    public static function setData($key, $value){
        self::$_data[$key] = $value;
    }
    // other non-static methods, using self::$_data
}

// to decouple, another class or something has been passed an instance of MyExample
// rather than calling MyExample::setData() explicitly
// however, this data is now accessible by other instances
$example->setData('some', 'data');

Are there plans to deprecate this sort of functionality, or am I right to expect support for this going forward? I work with error_reporting(-1) to ensure a very strict development environment, and there aren’t any issues as of yet (PHP 5.3.6) however I am aware of the reverse becoming unsupported; that is, instance methods being called statically.

Answer 1

From the Php documentation:

A property declared as static can not be accessed with an instantiated
class object (though a static method can).

So I think it will be forward-supported for a long time.