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PHP provides extensive support for developing object-oriented web applications. The area of object oriented programming is, however, large. Entire books can, and indeed have, been dedicated to the subject. As such, a detailed overview of object oriented software development is beyond the scope of this [[PHP bookEssentials]]. Instead we will introduce the basic concepts involved in object oriented programming and then move on to explaining the concept as it relates to PHP development.

The process of creating an object from the class 'blueprint' is called instantiation. Essentially, you instantiate an instance of the class and give that instance a name by which you will refer to it when acessing accessing members and calling methods. You can create as many object instances of a class as you desire. Objects are instantiated using the ''new'' keyword. For example, to create an instance of a class called ''bankAccount'' we would write:

One of the interesting feature features of object oriented programming is the ability to take a snapshot of the current state of an object and then save that object to a file, or even transmit it over a network to another process where it will be re-activated. This concept is known in the object oriented world as ''object serialization''.