AW: George Schlossnagle, please tell us a little about yourself and your involvement with the PHP and the Zend development team?

George: If you've seen my blog (http://www.schlossnagle.org/~george/blog/) you know that my wife and I just had our first child, Christopher, in September. I've really enjoyed becoming a father; it's an incredibly unique and wonderful experience.

In business life I'm a principal at Omniti Computer Consulting, where we both make an enterprise mail transfer agent and have a professional services branch which does custom Apache/PHP extension development. I have a couple PHP related projects that I maintain, including being the APC maintainer (although Rasmus has been doing much more work than I on it of late), the maintainer of APD, and one of the maintainers of the MySQL PDO driver. On the PHP core itself, I'm an occasional bug-fixer.

AW: PHP 5 is very popular for discussion within the PHP community: Please tell us, what is new in PHP 5 - new functions, new directives, object models, etc.?

George: Well, you could write a whole book on the new features in PHP 5 (in fact there are a few already!). The features I like most in PHP 5 are the new object model and enhanced XML support. PHP 5's object model has been described as 'Java-like', but it really serves to address some of the fundamental shortcomings in the PHP 4 object model. The improvements include objects being passed by handle (instead of pass-by-value in PHP 4), language level visibility semantics (private, protected, public), abstract classes and interfaces, and method and accessor interceptors. The object model has been greatly enhanced internally as well, and is reflected in a number of the new built-in extensions offering object-oriented interfaces.

On the XML front, PHP 5 has internally standardized on libxml2. This allows for XML resources to be internally converted between representations with ease. In addition to the old favorites of DOM (completely reimplemented) and SAX, PHP 5 also has a native object XML representation with SimpleXML and a pull parser in the XmlReader extension.

AW: And is PHP 5 a full stable release ?

George: PHP 5 is a full stable release, but I don't expect widespread adoption before 5.1.

AW: How would you describe the work, necessary to d