Sameer Borate has a new post to his blog looking at the idea of simulating the idea of packages that several other languages have (like Java) with similar functionality to use them.

Most modern languages have a concept of packages, wherein related classes are stored together. PHP sadly doesn't have a similar concept. [...] But in the spirit of 'programming into the language', what we can do is try to simulate a 'package-like' concept in PHP.

Wanting to stick with the "import()" function call, he's created a bit of sample code to mimic Java's loading method. The function more or less does what the auloading included in PHP can accomplish and he points out two issues with it - it doesn't really do a real "import" just an include and that, how it stands, you cannot tell what order the files will be included in (no sorting at all).