Most people have heard of "object-oriented" programming in PHP (even if they don't know what it is), but not as many have probably heard of "aspect-oriented" programming - an alternative that, while having its roots in Java, has been ported over to PHP.

In this new post on dotvoid.com, he talks about what this might mean for PHP (would it really be useful?) and a suggestion from Sebastian Bergmann on how built-in PHP calls could be used to facilitate aspect-oriented programming in PHP:

While attending Gunter Kniesel's "Aspect-Oriented Software Development" lecture yesterday it occured to me that it might be possible to (ab)use PHP 5's __autoload(), __call(), __get(), and __set() interceptors to facilitate Aspect-Oriented Programming with PHP.

If you're still wondering what "aspect-oriented programming" really is, this article from ONJava.com can definitely help - Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) complements OO programming by allowing the developer to dynamically modify the static OO model to create a system that can grow to meet new requirements.