Autoloading

Introduction

When you have a PHP application with a large number of classes, dependencies and files, can be very painful to create several require() or include() methods in order to load all classes upon every request. This practice can lead to several errors, besides making your application have a poor performance, since every single file will be loaded even if the current request is not using it. That's where autoloaders come in.

An autoloader will load automatically in runtime only those files that are being currently used. It will also increase your application performance by having predefined paths in where to look for files, and have a nice way to organize your application dependencies.

Glowie uses the Composer autoloader following the PSR-4 standards. If you need to set up a custom file for autoloading, use the composer.json file in the root directory.

Namespace reference

Glowie has several predefined namespaces that will be processed by the autoloader. Namespaces are, by default, routed to the following folders:

• Glowie\Commands namespace is stored into app/commands folder.

• Glowie\Controllers namespace is stored into app/controllers folder.

• Glowie\Middlewares namespace is stored into app/middlewares folder.

• Glowie\Migrations namespace is stored into app/migrations folder.

• Glowie\Models namespace is stored into app/models folder.

• Glowie\Helpers namespace is stored into app/views/helpers folder.

When autoloading classes, remember that class names and their namespaces must match the exact directory and filenames.