OOP : Traits

Summary: in this tutorial, you will learn how to use PHP traits to share functionality across independent classes, which are not in the same inheritance hierarchy.

Introduction to PHP traits

Code reuse is one of the most important aspects of object-oriented programming. In PHP, you use inheritance to enable code reuse in different classes that share the same inheritance hierarchy. To achieve code reuse, you move the common functionality of classes to method of the parent class. Inheritance makes the code very tightly coupled therefore makes the code hard to maintain.

To overcome this problem, as of version 5.4.0,  PHP introduced a new unit of code reuse named  trait.Traits allow you to reuse a set of methods freely in many different classes that does not need to be in the same class hierarchy.

Trait is similar to class but it is only for grouping methods in a fine-grained and consistent way. It is not allowed to instantiate a trait on its own.

http://www.zentut.com/php-tutorial/php-traits/