Over the last few weeks I have become enamored of using traits in PHP. Whereas I previously would put functions that need to be reused into either my Models or into helper functions, I have now started to make traits with these functions in them. For my Laravel application I created a directory app/Http/Traits where I keep my traits.

I started doing this when I began to optimize my code, trying to remove redundant code and remove unneccesary weight from my models. Using PHPStorm's very useful ability to find duplicated code I searched for blocks of 10 lines or more that were reused and moved those into traits. As I continued to do this I started to realize other benefits of using traits - mainly that it provides a way to simplify things. If the same action is taken in different controller or different parts of the application by using a Trait if I decide to change it I only have to change the code in one place rather than tracking down every place in the code that needs to be changed.

Labels: coding, laravel, php2