Re: Re: Function Cache

"Stig S. Bakken" wrote: > We're talking about different things. Your "autoload" is not > really for autoloading anything (AFAIK you can't add methods > to objects), but for catching "undefined function" errors. Yep. That is why I was calling it _delegate() at first. Using such a function, you can define a delegate object for any object, just as I did with my example class generic_proxy { var $proxy_reference; function _delegate($function_name) { // whatever the correct syntax is... ($this->proxy_reference)->$function_name(func_get_args()); } } You can then try to forward unknown method calls to your delegate object and see if it knows how to handle them. If it does, you act as the delegate object would have acted, presenting yourself to the outside as if you handled that call yourself. Sterling named this functionality AUTOLOAD, I believe in reference to Perl. I learned about delegate objects in Objective-C, where this method was used doing several really interesting things. One application is similar to our caching scenario, where the Objective-C people needed a generic (Remote Procedure Call-) Proxy class which can stand in for any other class, just like our generic_proxy does. In fact they went one step further in some other places, where the Proxy class used a method named pose_as($classname) to pose as the actual class it stood in for. Another application for delegate objects was to save yourself dozens of subclasses: Usually you had to handle application specific methods in many Window, View, Controller instances as well as to handle specific methods in Application. What you usually did for small applications was to create a single instance of some Model, and set the Model instance as a delegate for everything. This allowed you to handle all kinds of redraw events, menu activation things and everything else in your model instance, with no need to subclass Window, Application an so on. Basically, you insert just one additional class into the system and reroute all undefined events to that class. This works very well for small applications, can be transparently retrofitted if your application grows and makes for a very simple class hierarchy. Kristian -- Kristian Köhntopp, NetUSE AG Siemenswall, D-24107 Kiel Tel: +49 431 386 436 00, Fax: +49 431 386 435 99 Using PHP3? See our web development library at http://phplib.netuse.de/