Object-oriented fun

Kristine and I designed and are building a Friend class in our application framework that hopefully will make it much easier for other members of our group to contribute to the coding. We were concerned that the different learning curve shapes meant some members were getting left behind and not learning a lot. This class abstracts out the facebook backend plus our mysql backend, so all you need to do is create a

$person = new Friend(userId)

and then all of the things that are relevant about that person are available within php programmatically.

$person->getStatusMessage() will pull their current status message from facebook, while
$person->latitude() and person->longitude() will pull their locations from our mySQL database.

I suspect this will reduce performance - when we trying to display information for 10 friends at once, we will be hitting the facebook database/our database 10 times sequentially, rather than using their preferred array calls which get info for many users all at once (I did make it so all of the values get pulled from facebook at once, to at least somewhat limit the quantity of hits: if the desired member value is not yet set, it will call a member function to set all facebook values at once, and then if it is set, it will just display that value without talking to facebook again). However, performance is not what we're optimizing right now, right now we're just trying to make it a little easier to work inside our application framework.

Once again I'm learning practical uses of things I only had an academic appreciation for before... I've always "known" object-oriented programming, in that I created an object once in MAE 9, and knew that objects were containers for functions and variables. However, I've never really used it for a purpose, and now I'm excited at how useful objects are, how easy they make things.