PHP has become amazingly popular due to its simple pragmatic approach to solving the web problem. As the web evolves and users demand even more dynamic web applications, the need for PHP keeps growing. People want richer web applications, they want Ajax, JSON, and client-side magic to turn what used to be a series of linked pages into something resembling a desktop application.

In this talk, Lerdorf will cover the basic building blocks PHP 5 provides for building the backend of a rich web application and how to interact with client-side JavaScript libraries and a variety of web services. There will be a heavy focus on performance and scalability with benchmarks and tips along the way.