[Part one of this series.][1]

I’m fairly new to the php development thing. But I’m learning fast. Of course I’m having to deal with newbie problems along the way. Today I was adding a class to my DAL. Nothing special, mainly copy paste stuff. But php wasn’t being very cooperative, it kept showing me an empty page whenever I added (require_once(“filepath”)) that file to my factory. Not very amusing. So after a little searching I found out that php doesn’t support classes with the same name. But how am I supposed to know that the same name already exists somewhere? In short you can’t.

But there are solutions to the problem.

First: if you have php version 5.3 or higher you can use namespaces which is [nicely explained by David][2].

Second: if you have a version less then 5.3 you can use a poormans version, and should, of namespaces. Meaning, you have to add things to your classname and seperate them with an underscore. Something like

class LTD_User{}```

 [1]: /index.php/WebDev/ServerProgramming/php-wrtting-a-dal-the-dao-way-part-1
 [2]: http://blog.agoraproduction.com/index.php?/archives/47-PHP-Namespaces-Part-1-Basic-usage-gotchas.html