According to a new article from DevShed.com today, the question is posed - "Could PHP Soon Be Owned By Sun?"

PHP 5's official release occurred on July 13th with a complete re-haul of object-oriented programming features and improved MySQL functions. These are sure to be great additions to the package for PHP developers. However, many of the changes to PHP are hinting to something that may not necessarily be something PHP developers will like down the road.

They go into further detail on how PHP is similar to Java, as well as some of the more general features that PHP 5 added to the mix.

In their opinion: Zend clearly has underplayed the extent of the shift that has taken place concerning the future of PHP. While this version of PHP does provide a much better object model and added features, is this the beginning of the end of PHP as the choice of web scripting language for the open-source community and developers not under the employ of corporations? Will the average developer still be using PHP five years from now, or will the usefulness of PHP be limited to companies who can afford to shell out thousands of dollars for all of the necessary software that may be required to make PHP a viable option for development (along with the purchase of products from Sun, Macromedia, Oracle, Borland and others)?