With the release of version 5 PHP has really come of age, it had already conquered the home hacker market where the primary focus was on making it work, rather than making it work well. This was all well and good but PHP had always had trouble gaining ground in the smaller (in numerical terms), but far more profitable (in monetary terms) arena of enterprise level applications.

The elements of PHP that traditionally attracted the home hacker projects to the language, such as its forgiving nature and the ability to solve the same problem in half a dozen ways, were the exact same elements that drove away enterprise level projects. Enterprise level projects are far more interested in maintainability and scalability than hosting costs or the number of tutorials to be found online.

Despite it being possible to write good code using OOP in PHP4 - just look at PEAR, it was far from being a pleasant experience and always felt like it was more of a hack than a real solution. That’s not surprising as implementation of OOP in PHP4 was basically a series of hacks and work-rounds. Luckily the open source community is a stubborn and persistent bunch and continued to build solid LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) based apps until PHP got the upgrade it so desperately needed.