Difference and similarities of Object-Oriented PHP and Procedural PHP
Maybe You have just finished your web design course. You already mastered HTML, CSS, and basic Javascript. You are good at creating some static pages. But what next, you want to be a full-stack web developer. You want a more functional website that is data-driven. It takes data input from users and functions with respect to that. If that is so, you have to learn a backend server language. Among all back-end languages, PHP is still the most popular one. Like other languages, PHP also has two branches. One is the old school, procedural PHP and the object-oriented PHP. Let’s have a bit of discussion between them.
Our goal is to create a website that functions dynamically between the database and the user interface. Both ways we can achieve our goal, but procedural and oop takes a different path to reach the goal.
Procedural PHP language takes a sequence of instructions and follows a step-by-step approach to solve a particular problem. Here, Each step is done in a structured way so that a computer can understand what to do. And these instructions are divided into tiny functions in procedural programming while it is split into objects in oop. By using classes and objects in oop it generates models based on the real-world scenario.
In OOP, you create a class and define some properties and methods to it. You might not feel comfortable with those terms, properties, and methods. But if you know the POP, you know about variables and functions. In a way, they are the same thing. You declare a variable and create a function to solve a certain task. In OOP, you are doing the same thing but these variables and functions are wrapped in a class. This is called encapsulation, which is the main advantage of oop. A class encapsulated and stored for solving similar problems. Next, you just need to create an object for the class and use that for your purpose. This is called instantiation.
There are 3 types of access methods in oop. These are public, private, and protected. Data hiding is possible due to abstraction in OOPs and therefore it is more reliable than POP. Most of the modern sites are based upon oop. OOP provides a clear modular structure for programs and is good for defining abstract data types. Actually, it allows us the benefit of maintaining and modifying existing code. So it is far better to stick with oop after finishing the basics of PHP.
