Has everyone heard of a "fluent interface"? It's a term coined by
Martin Fowler that I just learned today. (Wondering if I've been in
the dark about this.)
Instead of returning null from your object setter methods, you return
a pointer to the object itself. This allows you to chain together
setter calls. For example, I saw this style when reading the
documentation for a new version of PEAR Services_Yahoo, which returns
search results from the Yahoo search engine:
$client = Services_Yahoo_Search::factory("web");
$results = $client->searchFor("Steve Fossett");
If you want more than 10 search results:
$results = $client->withResults(20)->searchFor("Steve Fossett");
If you want to start at the 90th result:
$results = $client->startingAt(90)->withResults(20)->searchFor("Steve
Fossett");
If you want the results returned in XML:
$results = $client->withType('XML')->startingAt(90)->withResults(20)-
>searchFor("Steve Fossett");
Chaining together these options seems to make it pretty readable. Is
anybody using this style?
Richard
Sources:
http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.webservices.services-
yahoo.examples.php
http://www.mikenaberezny.com/archives/35
http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/1362
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