Marco Tabini (of php|architect magazine) has posted some of his thoughts on why PHP just might be the "new Java" in the upcoming year.

Historically, PHP has been developed following the scratch-an-itch method [...]. This development process makes for some haphazard functionality, and has, in the past, been the source of many annoyances that need to be handled with extreme care.

He does mention some of the good things that have come out of this process like OOP in PHP4, SimpleXML functionality and type hinting but warns that if things swing too much the other way (planning out everything, only adding things by committee) that PHP might swerve towards a dangerous precedent - the Java community's mentality.