Mike Lively is happy about one thing - that late static binding (definition) has been committed and will be included with PHP 5.3. Unfortunately, he has a downside too:

The good news is late static binding has been introduced into head and looks like it will be merged into 5.3 before it is released. The horrible news is I really don't think the patch went as far as it needs to.

He talks about the original intention of the functionality (flexible inheritance for static methods/properties/constants) and how it was implemented, but with one small issue - that "static will ALWAYS return the 'resolved' name of the class used to call the current function". He illustrates with a code example showing an extended class returning a static property.

He also mentions two suggestions to help fix this issue:

• setting the behavior of parent:: such that it forwards the calling class through the next function call.
• introducing another scope [...] using a new keyword so parent:: could remain the same