Php Destructors

Please give me some real life examples when you had to use __destruct in your classes.

Answer

Ok, since my last answer apparently didn’t hit the mark, let me try this again. There are plenty of resources and examples on the internet for this topic. Doing a bit of searching and browsing other framework’s code and you’ll see some pretty good examples…

Don’t forget that just because PHP will close resources on termination for you doesn’t mean that it’s bad to explictly close them when you no longer need them (or good to not close them)… It depends on the use case (is it being used right up to the end, or is there one call early on and then not needed again for the rest of execution)…

Now, we know that __destruct is called when the object is destroyed. Logically, what happens if the object is destroyed? Well, it means it’s no longer available. So if it has resources open, doesn’t it make sense to close those resources as it’s being destroyed? Sure, in the average web page, the page is going to terminate shortly after, so letting PHP close them usually isn’t terrible. However, what happens if for some reason the script is long-running? Then you have a resource leak. So why not just close everything when you no longer need it (or considering the scope of the destructor, when it’s no longer available)?

Here’s some examples in real world frameworks:

1. Lithium’s lithiumnetSocket class
2. Kohana’s Memcached Driver
3. Joomla’s FTP Implementation
4. Zend Frameworks’s SMTP Mail Transport Class
5. CodeIgniter’s TTemplate Class
6. A Tidy Filter Helper for Cake
7. A Google-Groups Thread about using Destructors For the Symfony Session Class

The interesting thing is that Kohana keeps track of the tags, so that it can delete by “namespace” later (instead of just clearing the cache). So it uses the destructor to flush those changes to the hard storage.

The CodeIgniter class also does something interesting in that it adds debugging output to the output stream in the destructor. I’m not saying this is good, but it’s an example of yet another use…

I personally use destructors whenever I have long running processes on my master controller. In the constructor, I check for a pid file. If that file exists (And its process is still running), I throw an exception. If not, I create a file with the current processes id. Then, in the destructor I remove that file. So it’s more about cleaning up after itself than just freeing resources…