PHP5 is going to be the focus of much of my time in the coming year, this much seems certain. Ruby on Rails will take years to reach PHP's level of ubiquity with web hosts, who still seem in the process of upgrading to this new version of the language.

PHP5 features a complete rewrite of the object model. It's OOP support is so broad it seems more pertinent to point out what common OO features it doesn't implement, as opposed to which it does:

• No C++ style templates
• No metaclasses
• No namespaces
• No operator overloading

Other than this PHP5 seems to have the works. Plus a lot of MySQL/XML features i haven't gotten around to yet.

Adam Trachtenberg is the man to spill about PHP5, here's an overview of the language's new features, and here's his blog, which should be a mandatory RSS feed for any PHP developer. I also had a chat with Ed Lecky-Thompson last week, who's contributed to the Professional PHP5 title. Looks solid too, though i haven't read it yet.

Hopefully this'll all help move PHP developers away from the procedural and into strict OOP for the bigger projects, where frameworks can be built, design patterns effected, and many hours browsing tangled procedural code & rough testing methods avoided. That said, it's important to retain the rapid development capabilities that procedural PHP encourages - this sets it apart from languages like Java, after all.

And if there's one thing PHP does not want to be, it's Java.