osCommerce Blog

My attention was recently brought to an article at Zend describing the differences between developing with a procedural approach and with an object-oriented approach, which had taken the osCommerce project as an example of a solution developed with the procedural approach.

The article can be found here:

http://www.zend.com/zend/art/oo-proc.php

I found it to be a great read as it points out that although there are advantages and disadvantages to each development approach, that osCommerce does very well at what it was designed to be as to how it was developed in a procedural style.

This can of course be seen by the huge interest and growing community of store owners and developers the project has attracted, with work being shared and features being released as contributions for all to use that extend on the framework the procedural approach has provided.

Although the procedural approach has been successful for the project, its limitations on extensibility has been met and is one of the primary reasons for moving towards an object-oriented approach for the 2.2 Milestone 3 release.

The core of the changes involved here is the introduction of the template structure implementation that minimizes the amount of work needed to change the layout of a page. The development that has occurred here in the last month leading from the meeting in Belgium has built on the implementation to increase the possibilities the framework will provide.

To strengthen the API the framework provides, phpdoc style commenting has been added to the source code to not only provide an overview of the functions, classes, and class methods available, but to also take advantage of the phpdoc features PHP editors have implemented such as the Zend Studio IDE, to aid developers during their work sessions.

The small framework that existed in the procedural approach now provides more possibilities with the API the object-oriented approach brings in, allowing the framework to be extended in many more ways not otherwise possible. It is always exciting to think about what this means for the community and seeing what success the object-oriented approach can bring to the project in comparison to the success the procedural approach has brought.