PHP 5 Power Programming

1.2. Language Features

1.2.1. New Object-Oriented Model

When Zeev Suraski added the object-oriented syntax back in the days of PHP 3, it was added as “syntactic sugar for accessing collections.” The OO model also had support for inheritance and allowed a class (and object) to aggregate both methods and properties, but not much more. When Zeev and Andi Gutmans rewrote the scripting engine for PHP 4, it was a completely new engine; it ran much faster, was more stable, and boasted more features. However, the OO model first introduced in PHP 3 was barely touched.

Although the object model had serious limitations, it was used extensively around the world, often in large PHP applications. This impressive use of the OOP paradigm with PHP 4, despite ...