PHP: A Look at New and Cool Things in the World of PHP

I am sitting in Rasmus Lerdorf's session "A Look at New and Cool Things in the World of PHP". Rasmus is the creator of PHP and works for Yahoo!. He just arrived from Croatia and will be leaving Santa Clara one hour after this session ends.

The session is very informative as I haven't been playing with PHP5 ever since my migration to Ruby on Rails. A lot of exciting developments and changes have been made to PHP. If you are using a PHP application and still running PHP4, you really need to upgrade as soon as possible.

Rasmus says he hates SOAP and isn't going to talk about them a lot. He prefers REST based services.

The top search on Yahoo! was Wikipedia.

Yahoo! has released some new libraries for presenting images with Javascripts.

See the image presentation he created using Yahoo! search at Buzz.ProgPHP.com

Now he is talking about using Yahoo's APIs including Map Tiles APIs.

It's interesting to see Rasmus's interest in Flash.

Rasmus is giving a brief crash course in AJAX with PHP. Everything is presenting is really awesome if I hadn't been introduced to Ruby on Rails.

Now we are back to using Yahoo's UI libraries.

Rasmus gave a minute for questions and answers since he has to leave.

Conference session slides and materials are available at


Getting Rich with PHP
APC: http://pecl.php.net/package/APC
YDN: http://developer.yahoo.net