object oriented?

hi everyone, i decided to join this community because i'm developing a casual interest in PHP and adding it to my arsenal of known computer languages. my background is primarily in java and am entirely sold on the philosophy of object-oriented principles and development. most of the PHP i've seen has been procedural, quite ugly, and poorly written...but from what i understand of the language, it does have some object-oriented features like inheritance, polymorphism, etc. so a few questions then... do you write PHP in an object-oriented fashion and how would you compare it to true OO languages like Java/C++? also, can you point me to an example or to of some object-oriented PHP applications? thanks!