Tuesday, 27 March 2007

Article: Learn to Process File Data with Template Classes in PHP 5

Alejandro Gervasio brings in the final article of a two part series on Template Classes that began with ‘Working with template classes in PHP 5.’ He says, this series steps you through creating template classes in PHP-controlled development environments, and also shows you how to use this pattern in real-world situations.

In the preceding article, he had demonstrated on how to build a template class in PHP and use it in conjunction with subclasses via a step-by-step process. He says, the purpose of developing the programmatic model dictated by the pattern was to create a group of interrelated classes, which were capable of applying different (X)HTML formatting tags to a given MySQL result set.

In the final article, he shows how to creates a set of template objects that will control the visual appearance of data fetched from different files. He explains the template class under the following sections:

• Building a basic file processing class: he starts with of defining a basic file processing class, which will be used later on by a template object to display contents fetched from a specific target file.
• Creating a simple template class: after defining the file processing class , in this section he builds the structure of the template class.
• Building a few simple subclasses: in this section, he builds three different child classes.
• Seeing the template pattern in action: he builds a simple PHP script where all the previous template classes will be put to work in conjunction.