Topics of the talks included:

• Rasmus Lerdorf's Getting Rich with PHP
• Sam Heisz speaking on Quercus
• David Sklar's talk on Metaprogramming (with source code)
• Jasien Mathai discussing How PHP, JSON and AJAX Can Benefit Your Business
• PHP Web Services from Christian Wenz

For summaries of all of these talks and links to many more of the slides, check out the full list on the New York PHP Conference website.

There has been quite a bit of buzz about Rod Smith's keynote at last week's NYPHP Conference & Expo. Rod and his team provided a case study of a situational application built for the National Association of Broadcasters and performed a live demo of how to go about creating a five minute application.

It was pretty interesting stuff, but Rasmus Lerdorf followed with what I found to be an even more impressive mashup that the audience could better relate to. He showed a tool he built for internal use at Yahoo which serves as an corporate Craig's List of sorts, with hooks to Web services to provide posters with recommended price ranges and stock photos of the item they are selling.

He mentions that the real technology that made these two applications as "cool" as they are and really makes them possible is Ajax - both use it to pull the data from the Web services in.

It's a good summary of what the talk was about, and provides a few bits that weren't covered in the slides. If you're looking for a good place to start with researching PDO and its associated technologies, her list is a good place to start.

Each heading is accompanied by at least three points, clearly written as to include the most information. Some examples of the topics covered include: "Why PDO?", "Persistent Connections", "Prepared Statements", and "Retrieving information using PDO".

His talk, "Efficient Debugging with XDebug" taught how to detect and debug scripts with the help of XDebug. It starts with some background on the application's internals followed by a look at how it uses stack/function traces, dumps of variables, and modified PHP functions to find th problems in your app. He also gives an example of how to use the software to find bottlenecks in scripts with the help of the profiler.

This latest talk can be grabbed directly from his talks page and here [pdf]

Metaprogramming is a handy approach for object-relational mapping tools, web-programming frameworks, and other problem domains where building a new programming language on top of an old one becomes the shortest route to a solution.

PHP's 'solve the web problem' aesthetic makes some metaprogramming tasks difficult, but it nevertheless has a large collection of features that let you programmatically tweak syntax, style, and other coding aspects.

His talk looks at various methods to help you get started, including working with the "magic methods" and SPL interfaces.