A friend and I have been working on different projects together. We recently decided to share one of our tool to the open source community.

Its name is the Autoload Manager.

The AutoLoad Manager is a generic autoloader that can be used with any PHP framework or library. Using the PHP tokenizer mechanism, it will parse folder(s) and discover the different classes and interfaces defined. The big advantage of using this autoloadManager is that it will allow you to implement whatever naming rules you want and may have mutliple classes in one file (if you want to have a such feature).

So basically, you don’t have anymore to implement some complex naming rules between the filename and the classname. You may organize the way you want your API (may have as many subfolders as you want, you may have multiple API folders, etc.).

What does it do ?

Well, it will basically allow you to use this tool as a generic autoload for any of your project.

How does it work ?

It will scan any given folder and find any defined PHP classes or interfaces. It will then create an hashtable that will reference what class can be found in what file. This hash table is serialized and cached in a file.

Whenever, your program or script will look for a non-existing class, the autoloadManager will look on that hash table and load the file if it exists. A fallback mechanism can be used also in a development environment that will try to rescan all the folders once more (this mechanism is usefull when you are often adding new classes to your program).

Where can I download it ?

You can browse the code and download it from github.com.

http://github.com/alfallouji/PHP-Autoload-Manager/

You can also directly get the source code from the git repository.

git clone git://github.com/alfallouji/PHP-Autoload-Manager.git

You can also download the latest stable release (ver 1.0) here :

PHP-Autoload-Manager version 1.0

Who wrote it ?

This script have been written by Bashar Al-Fallouji (bashar@alfallouji.com) and Pierrick Charron (pierrick@webstart.fr).

How can I use it ?

First, you will have simply to load the autoloadManager class into your script.

include('api/autoloadManager.php'); 

Secondly, you will have to define the path where the autoloadManager will store the file containing the serialized hash table.

// Defines the path where the file containing the autoload
// array will be stored
// Apache User must have Write Access to this folder !
DEFINE('AUTOLOAD_SAVE_PATH', sys_get_temp_dir()); 

Then, you have the two main features offered by this script.

1. Register the loadClass function:

spl_autoload_register('autoloadManager::loadClass'); 

2. Add a folder to process:

autoloadManager::addFolder('{YOUR_FOLDER_PATH}');

For instance, if your classes are found in ‘/var/www/myProject/lib’ and ‘/var/www/myProject/includes’, then you can do something like this.

autoloadManager::addFolder('/var/www/myProject/lib');
autoloadManager::addFolder('/var/www/myProject/includes');
spl_autoload_register('autoloadManager::loadClass'); 

That’s all you have to do ! You can use whatever class you want in your script now !

Can I use this code?

Yes, here is a copy of the license.

This Code is released under the GNU LGPL
 
Please do not change the header of the file(s).
 
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or 
modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public 
License as published by the Free Software Foundation; 
either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any 
later version.
 
This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty
of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
 
See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

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