New core functionality "newinstance"

at 2006-11-29 in RFCs, Announcements, Homepage by friebe (0 comments)

Now that RFC 0080: Anonymous class creation has been implemented, here's an overview of what can be changed for the better by using the newinstance() core functionality.

In unittests there's often the one-time need for mock objects implementing a certain interface or extending a certain base class. To date, this was accomplished by using the ClassLoader's defineClass() method. Here's an example:

  $cl= &ClassLoader::getDefault();
  $class= &$cl->defineClass('net.xp_framework.unittest.util.StringCaseComparator', '
    class StringCaseComparator extends Object {
      function compare($a, $b) { 
        return strcasecmp($a, $b); 
      }
    } implements("StringCaseComparator.class.php", "util.Comparator");
  ');
  $instance= &$class->newInstance();

This can now be rewritten as follows:

  $instance= &newinstance('util.Comparator', array(), '{
    function compare($a, $b) { 
      return strcasecmp($a, $b); 
    }
  }'));

First of all, this is less to type (and programmers like to type less

), and second this could - if one day we'd be using some version of PHP (or another language) which supports this natively - migrate these cases to:

  $instance= new util.Comparator() {
    function compare($a, $b) { 
      return strcasecmp($a, $b); 
    }
  };

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