Functions vs. Static Methods

Question

I\'ve got a few functions that deal with cookies. Would it be a horrible idea to group them by moving them to a class of their own and use them as static methods?

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Answer 1

It would be a great idea, provided you are fully aware of the caveats involved. This is known as the Utility Pattern:

Good candidates for utility classes are convenience methods that can be grouped together functionally.

Answer 2

That would be a great way of organising your code, but why use static functions, just make a class for the required functionality.

Or as said above use namespaces, but I'm not particularly familiar with the pros/cons of them.

$cookie->get() is nicer to work with than cookie_get() in my opinion

Answer 3

Yes, that would be a horrible idea because static methods are hard to test and mock. Why not just create a real Cookie class that you can configure at runtime with those methods as regular methods.

If you just want to group those functions into a package, you can just as well use Namespaces.

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^{Edit: Since you brought it up in the comments: yes, for any testing purposes regular functions are as untestable as statics. So your initial situation is as "horrible" as changing it to use a static class. Even the pseudo namespace is not giving you any advantage, because you already applied that to your regular functions as well. cookie_get is as good or bad as Cookie::get.}

Answer 4

It's actually good practice to organize functions like that. A modern alternative would be to use a namespace.