general question re PHP OOP support

Hello and happy new year.

I've written a fairly complex PHP/MySQL application
that manages the schedule for the New York City
federal court interpreters office, where I'm a staff
interpreter. It's a suite of database-driven PHP
pages, with lots of Javascript, for scheduling
interpreter events, tracking who's supposed to be
where when, maintaining rosters of contract
interpreters, judges, attorneys who are involved, etc.

The good news is, it works pretty damn well indeed
(applause). Thank you. The bad news is, the way it's
coded:  crude, inelegant, ill-though-out, redundant,
hard to understand and maintain. Chunks of code are
repeated that should be in functions, functions recur
that should be stored in external libraries, things
are pasted and patched together in an ad hoc, 
improvisatory way. I should add that I'm one of those
self-taught, accidental programmers who started with
HTML about 6 years ago, then tried a little Perl/CGI,
and one thing led to another. So that's my excuse --
I've been learning on the job. (And loving it.)

Meanwhile, I've studied some OOP with Perl, and have
taken a course in Java that emphasizes OOP design
principles, and have learned a bunch of stuff (not
that there ain't one helluva long road ahead (-:). So
I'm contemplating re-coding the entire thing,
practically from the ground up.

Question:  do you think PHP's support for OOP is
strong enough for a complex project such as this?
Should I consider rewriting it all in another
language, skip the web server entirely, and instead
create a GUI client that communicates directly with
the database?

TIA,

David Mintz
Spanish Interpreter
US District Court, SDNY
Personal http://panix.com/~dmintz/
Web design & hosting http://dmintzweb.com/









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