Re: define() or $variable for application settings?

Chris wrote:

Hi Matt, I use define's.

me too. mostly because unless you use the runkit extension or something you can't undefine or change the values of a constant. bare in mind though that define() is horribly slow (to paraphrase Rasmus) which may be the reason many projects choose to use variables instead. see here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.apc-define-constants.php

With variables it's easy to forget to global'ise it when you go into a function, define's don't have this issue.

also true :-).

Matt Arnilo S. Baluyos (Mailing Lists) wrote:

Hello Everyone, I have a config.inc.php file which basically contains all the configuration info that the applications needs (directory/file locations, database credentials, etc). The information there is set using the define() function. However, I've seen some open-source projects which either use $variables or associative arrays to save the values. My application works pretty fine but I'd like to solicit opinions from everyone on what they are using in this case. Also, I have plans of putting up a sort of coding guidelines for the company so it might help to have other opinions on this one. Thanks and best regards, Matt