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One of the key ingredients in the upcoming version 5 of PHP will be the Zend Engine 2.0, with support for a brand new object-oriented programming model. This article describes the evolution of the object-oriented programming support in PHP, covering the new features and changes that are scheduled for PHP 5.
by Zeev Suraski
November 15, 2002
ew people know this, but when PHP as we know it today was being molded, back in the summer of 1997, there were no plans for it to have any object-oriented capabilities. Andi Gutmans and I were working to create a powerful, robust and efficient Web language loosely based on the PHP/FI 2.0 and C syntax. As a matter of fact, we got pretty far without having any notion of classes or objects—it was to be a purely structured language. However, on August 27th of that year, PHP's object capabilities changed.
When classes were introduced to the code base of what was to become PHP 3.0, they were added as syntactic sugar for accessing collections. PHP already had the notion of associative array collections, and the new classes were nothing but a neat new way of accessing them. However, as time has proven, this new syntax proved to have a much more far-reaching effect on PHP than was originally intended.
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ew people know this, but when PHP as we know it today was being molded, back in the summer of 1997, there were no plans for it to have any object-oriented capabilities. Andi Gutmans and I were working to create a powerful, robust and efficient Web language loosely based on the PHP/FI 2.0 and C syntax. As a matter of fact, we got pretty far without having any notion of classes or objects—it was to be a purely structured language. However, on August 27th of that year, PHP's object capabilities changed.
