In a recent post to his blog, Jeff Moore advocates the philosophy that, in your OOP application development, you should "let your properties be properties".

Some times there are some ancillary methods to deal with unsetting, checking for existence, setting via an array, or dealing with references in PHP 4. They can really clutter up the definition of a class. That's not good.

[...] I think the idea is to make the class extensible. But PHP is really ok with just setting new properties on a class. So why not just do this?

He argues that getters and setters in a class are less useful than just setting the property yourself. Using the property name as part of the interface, though (like getting the $obj->foo value with $obj->getFoo) is stil clean enough to be useful.