From the Professionl PHP Blog today, there's a followup post to his Why isn't PHP the natural successor to Java? post previously - a look at some of the items mentioned in the Zend Framework, branching into a discussion of PHP's object capabilities.

Joshua Eichorn (among others) notices that active record can't work as shown in the Zend Framework webcast. The syntax presented during the web cast is not possible in PHP because of inherited static methods are treated. Mike Naberezny notes the problem and suggests that it will end up getting fixed in PHP, the sitepoint thread Trouble in Zend Framework Land?, 33degrees smells vaporware, and Elizabeth Marie Smith does too.

I look at this incident as an incredibly good omen. My optimism about Zend's PHP framework is not for the framework itself, but for what it means for OO support in PHP. In my book, the more developers that have commit access to both ZPF and to PHP, the better PHP 6 will be for me. I look at ZPF as an important step in building a culture of objects in the PHP community.

He continues, talking more about how object-oriented languages are still popping up right and left, and how PHP, at its core, needs an OO layer built on top to compare. He's not looking to belittle the OOP support in PHP, just to note that there's more work to be done - and the Zend Framework might be what pushed the development of that along...