Php – Best to use Private methods or Protected methods

oopPHP

In a lot of my PHP projects, I end up with classes that have non-public functions that I don't intend to extend.

Is it best to declare these as protected, or private?

I can see arguments both ways – making them private is a far more conservative approach, but it can be argued that they could be made protected later if I want the method to be extended and it makes it clear which methods are extended by base classes.

On the other hand, is using private somehow antisocial, in that it impedes a theoretical future developer from extending my code without modification?

Best Answer

My instinct is to keep them private, until you need them to be otherwise.

It has been argued (sadly I've misplaced the link) that making methods private is antisocial, in much the same way as making them 'final', in that it's fairly dictatorial about how people may use your code.

I'm not convinced, however, and agree that you should expose only what you really need to. The exception would be a library or toolkit, where you'll expect users to want to extend (in the general sense) your code in ways which you would never foresee. In which case making well-chosen methods protected can be seen as providing flex-points.

Related Solutions

C++ – When should you use a class vs a struct in C++

The differences between a class and a struct in C++ is:

struct members and base classes/structs are public by default.
class members and base classes/struts are private by default.

Both classes and structs can have a mixture of public, protected and private members, can use inheritance and can have member functions.

I would recommend you:

use struct for plain-old-data structures without any class-like features;
use class when you make use of features such as private or protected members, non-default constructors and operators, etc.

JavaScript private methods

You can do it, but the downside is that it can't be part of the prototype:

function Restaurant() {
    var myPrivateVar;

    var private_stuff = function() {  // Only visible inside Restaurant()
        myPrivateVar = "I can set this here!";
    }

    this.use_restroom = function() {  // use_restroom is visible to all
        private_stuff();
    }

    this.buy_food = function() {   // buy_food is visible to all
        private_stuff();
    }
}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

C++ – When should you use a class vs a struct in C++

JavaScript private methods

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