The IPC2K5 blog has a bit more information from Tobias Schlitt and Stephan Schmidt's talk about XML and Webservices - Part 1 and Part 2.

Presented by Tobias Schlitt and Stephan Schmidt, we were warned that this session would be a Buzzword Parade, XML, XLST, Xpath etc. Webservice examples will be provided by a popular online bookstore starting with 'A', an online auction site starting with 'E' and a web search site starting with 'G'. The talk was very well presented, the first section gave an overview of XML and how PHP impements these functions. Each technology was reviewed and the pro's and con's were explained in detail. (Read more)

In part two of this talk we step back and look at specific PEAR and PECL libraries which allow PHP users to easily create XML documents. The modules that were covered were XMLReader/XMLWriter from Pecl and many of the XML_* libraries from PEAR. The SOAP library and new XMLRPCi extensions were also covered. Unfortunatly with over 200 slides to cover in 6 hours of time, there was not enough time to complete all the available material. The slides will be made available on the PEAR website.

Presentations like this are great for the community - a sort of "set things straight" talk that can help clarify what technologies really are good for what...