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Etsy has (or had when I was still working there) a cool directory-namespace based custom autoloader for PHP (named, not inexplicably, EtsyLoader). When the PHP

Etsy has (or had when I was still working there) a cool directory-namespace based custom autoloader for PHP (named, not inexplicably, EtsyLoader). When the PHP runtime detected that the script was trying to use an identifier not in scope, the loader would try to find a matching file by splitting the identifier on underscores into different folders, with the last segment being the target file. So Listings_Migration_Checker would get resolved to listings/migration/checker.php. Way more deterministic and predictable than Rails autoloading, which always seems to devolve into a crazy mess. And you knew exactly where a constant was located on disk just by eyeballing the name.

metadat 5y ago
This sounds really cool! Unfortunate and a bit bummed out that nothing relevant currently turns up in google: https://www.google.com/search?q=EtsyLoader+php+github https://www.google.com/search?q=EtsyLoader+php+github
ehnto 5y ago
An eCommerce framework called Magento did a similar thing, it made for some fantastically long class names, but I was never left wondering where something lived and autocomplete was never confused. They did this with underscores because namespaces didn't exist back then, but namespace based autoloading is essentially the same thing. PHP passes the autoloader function the full namespaced string `\Some\Namespaced\Class` and you do your directory traversal based on that inside the autoload function. PHP makes it pretty easy to have multiple custom autoloaders too, which I've used to help bring legacy projects into modern times before. Even inside older frameworks with no awareness of classes, you can register an autoloader and start using the classes and namespaces in your module/plugin. When PHP runtime detects an unknown class, it will go through every autoloader function registered with spl_autoload_register.

metadat 5y ago

This sounds really cool! Unfortunate and a bit bummed out that nothing relevant currently turns up in google: https://www.google.com/search?q=EtsyLoader+php+github https://www.google.com/search?q=EtsyLoader+php+github

ehnto 5y ago

An eCommerce framework called Magento did a similar thing, it made for some fantastically long class names, but I was never left wondering where something lived and autocomplete was never confused. They did this with underscores because namespaces didn't exist back then, but namespace based autoloading is essentially the same thing. PHP passes the autoloader function the full namespaced string `\Some\Namespaced\Class` and you do your directory traversal based on that inside the autoload function. PHP makes it pretty easy to have multiple custom autoloaders too, which I've used to help bring legacy projects into modern times before. Even inside older frameworks with no awareness of classes, you can register an autoloader and start using the classes and namespaces in your module/plugin. When PHP runtime detects an unknown class, it will go through every autoloader function registered with spl_autoload_register.