Using PHP Classes for Device Objects

Question

I have developed a Web Interface for managing our devices (Dedicated Servers/Switches/etc) at work, however with my basic PHP knowledge, I ignored OOP completely. In the current state it just queries the MYSQL Database and populates the tables. Functions are all stored in a Functions.php file and called as needed.

As the project is functional and used now, I would like to rewrite this to be more efficient as it will be used among our other brands. I am having trouble applying the concept of classes to this project though (I use them all the time in C#/C++).

The way I see it, each Device be it a server, switch, etc. could be a part of a Device class that keeps properties like Datacenter, Name, etc. and methods such as Update, Delete, etc. I suppose I could additionally have a base Device class, then subsequent classes such as Server/Switch/etc. which inherit from that.

My question then is how is this more efficient? Each time the page loads I am still going to have to generate each instance of Device and then populate it from the Database, why I don't really see how this is better than the current implementation.

Thanks for any insight!

Answer 1

Using OOP is mostly unrelated to performance or efficiency. However, it allows you to organize your code in a modular fashion, and encourage code reuse.

A better webpage to explain can be found here.