Project directory structure

Question

Actually i'm using this project directory structure http://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/project-structure.project.html

But recently i started using namespaces in all my php-classes like:

Myapp\Configuration\
Myapp\Controller\
Myapp\Persistence\Entities\
Myapp\Persistence\Dao\
Myapp\Validation
....

and now I'm a little bit confused on where should i put all this directories in order to maintain a correct folder structure.
In the old project directory structure i also wrote directory names in lowercase, but now with namespaces i saw that most frameworks use camelcase like in the example above.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Most modern PHP projects are structured much like a Java package; ie a top level source folder, with subdirectories for each vendor, containing subdirectories for individual packages and so on.

However, because PHP doesn't have the same kind of loading of classes as a language like Java, it loads its classes using an autoload function. This means that files must be in a predictable location, or else be missed by the loader.

The PSR-0 and PSR-4 specifications from the PHP Framework Interop Group (PHP-FIG) are intended to standardise the stucture of packages. These specifications are adopted and implemented by pretty much all ¹ modern (see: last few years) PHP libraries, packages and applications; aidedin no small part, I'm sure, by Composer.

In short, the PSR-0 specification requires that, under a given directory, files be structured and named according to the namespace of the single class they contain. For example, if the source directory is src and you have a class My\Simple\Class, then your class could be found at

~/src/My/Simple/Class.php

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¹ I can't think of a single project off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are some out there.