Do you prefix your classnames ?

Question

Hi everybody,

Simple question : do you prefix your PHP classes (for example your library classes) with the name of your company ?

Example : Zend prefix everything with "Zend_", but that's normal because this is a framework (so they want to avoid conflicts). Should I do the same for the library classes of my company ? Will I ever get conflicts ?

I think this is easier to use without the prefix (shorter names), but is that a good practice to have a prefix ?

Answer 1

PHP has namespaces. You should use them instead of prefixing everything with a name.

At the very least, your developers will thank you when they don't have to keep typing MyFrameworkName... just to start using one of your classes.

Answer 2

No. Although I did consider prefixing every class in my CMS with MCB, i.e.

class MCB_Admin
{
    // class contents...
}
$admin = new MCB_Admin;

However, I quickly decided against this and now just use standard class names.

Answer 3

I always prefix my classes for a number of reasons

• 5.2 will still be around for a couple of years
• 5.3 namespaces are totally ugly, i cannot use them without getting nauseous
• and hey, apple does that too (NSString, CFXMLParser etc) ;))

Seriously, it's better to avoid explicit class names altogether. Get rid of statics and use dependency injection instead of new - and you'll have much less pain with class naming.

Answer 4

Yes, I do. I can't switch to namespaces b/c most of my clients are running PHP 5.3 yet. I don't mind typing a little more if I'm guaranteed to avoid naming conflicts. Especially when I'm using my own custom library on top of existing ones.

Answer 5

i prefix my classnames with the folder name it lives is in

<?php
    // filename would be "ClassName.php" in directory "directory"
    class directory_ClassName{

    }

that way it make using __autoLoad extremely easy

function __autoload( $class_name ){
    $file = explode( "_", $class_name );
    $file =  'app/' . implode( '/', $file ) . ".php";
    require_once( $file );
}

meaning you never have to load your classes, its all done automagicly