Michael Girouard has a new post (complete with slides about the PHP and Ajax presentation he gave at a recent New York PHP user group meeting, "Ajax for PHP Developers".

It felt a little strange presenting a JavaScript topic to a bunch of PHP developers, but I made it come back to PHP by demonstrating a the latest Panda PHP package which is only in incubation at the moment.

You can check out the slides on Slideshare and download the code from his site.

Daniel Crook points out the next meeting of the New York PHP Group where Dan Gisolfi will be talking about some of the latest things that IBM has been up to in the mashup arena.

Centered around the concept of "situational applications," IBM's work with mashups targets a growing trend in Web site development. [...] IT specialists should embrace the model as a foothold for PHP in the enterprise.

Some of Dan's presentation is outlined as well - a demo of IBM's Mashup Starter Kit, a look at best practices, and talk on the collaboration of IBM with Zend and ProgrammableWeb. If you're wanting to attend, be sure you RSVP as soon as possible (before the 21st @ 3pm) to reserve your spot.

Those in the New York area might want to check out a new post Daniel Krook has concerning his talk he'll be giving on native XML databases at next week's New York PHP User Group meeting.

The presentation follows a mailing list thread and resulting blog post that generated a lot of interest and discussion on the topic. It should be a great talk for database administrators, application developers and content producers alike.

According to the summary of the talk, he'll be discussing what XML databases are good for and why you might choose them over a normal database. For more information on attending, check out the NYPHP User Group website.

Matthew Weir O'Phinney has posted the slides from a New York PHP User Group meeting that Mark de Visser (of Zend) and he spoke at:

Mark presented information on Zend's development stack and toolset (which I entirely missed, as I was still in transit), and I came in to give an overview of Zend Framework.

Matthew posted the slides right to his blog. They're in a browser-based slideshow system that will launch wen you double-click on the index file.