Calling the variable property directly vs getter/setters - OOP Design

Question

I know this is probably subjective but I read this optimization page from Google for PHP and they suggest use the variable property directly without the need of getters and setters. Understandably I see the performance gain in this but is this really a good design practice to follow?

Their Example using getter/setter:

class dog {
  public $name = '';

  public function setName($name) {
    $this->name = $name;
  }

  public function getName() {
    return $this->name;
  }
}

$rover = new dog();
$rover->setName('rover');
echo $rover->getName();

Suggested Optimization:

$rover = new dog();
$rover->name = 'rover';
echo $rover->name;

This would be a welcome change in my design process as I see the need for getters/setters going away, but what other hurdles/benefits might occur in doing this?

Answer 1

This would be a welcome change in my design process as I see the need for getters/setters going away, but what other hurdles/benefits might occur in doing this?

You lose the ability to implement special get/set logic on a particular property. For properties that are scalars (strings, integers, booleans) maybe this is no problem. But what if you have a property that is a lazy-loaded class instance?

class Document
{
    protected $_createdBy;

    public function getCreatedBy()
    {
        if (is_integer($this->_createdBy)) {
            $this->_createdBy = UserFactory::loadUserById($this->_createdBy);
        }
        return $this->_createdBy;
    }
}

That trick only works in a method. You could use __get and __set for this logic but as you add properties you end up with a big nasty switch() block:

public function __get($name)
{
    switch ($name) {
        case 'createdBy':
            // blah blah blah
        case 'createdDate':
            // more stuff
        // more case statements until you scream
    }
}

If you just want to avoid or put off writing getters and setters, use the __call magic method to trap method calls that follow the getProperty() and setProperty() naming convention. You can put all the default get/set logic in __call and never touch it again:

abstract class Object
{
    public function __call($method, $args)
    {
        $key = '_' . strtolower(substr($method, 3, 1)) . substr($method, 4);
        $value = isset($args[0]) ? $args[0] : null;
        switch (substr($method, 0, 3)) {
            case 'get':
                if (property_exists($this, $key)) {
                    return $this->$key;
                }
                break;

            case 'set':
                if (property_exists($this, $key)) {
                    $this->$key = $value;
                    return $this;
                }
                break;

            case 'has':
                return property_exists($this, $key);
                break;
        }

        throw new Exception('Method "' . $method . '" does not exist and was not trapped in __call()');
    }
}

This approach is very fast from a development standpoint because you can just extend the Object class, define some properties, and you're off to the races:

class Foo extends Object
{
    protected $_bar = 12345;
}

$foo = new Foo();
echo $foo->getBar();  // outputs '12345'
$foo->setBar(67890);  // next call to getBar() returns 67890
$foo->getBaz();       // oops! 'baz' doesn't exist, exception for you

It's slow from an execution standpoint because magic methods are damned slow, but you can mitigate that later by defining explicit getBar() and setBar() methods (because __call is only invoked when you calling a method that isn't defined). But if a particular property doesn't get accessed very often, maybe you don't care how slow it is. The point is, it's easy to add special get/set methods later on and the rest of your code never knows the difference.

I cribbed this approach from Magento and I find it to be very developer-friendly. Throwing an exception when calling the get/set for a property that doesn't exist helps you avoid phantom bugs caused by typos. Keeping property-specific logic in its own get/set methods makes code easier to maintain. But you don't have to write all the accessor methods at the start, you can easily go back and add them without refactoring all your other code.

The question is, what are you trying to optimize? Developer time or code speed? If you want to optimize code speed, make sure you know where your bottlenecks are before building your code around them. Premature optimization is the root of all evil.