Rael Dornfest has posted his slides from the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, detailing Meerkat, PHP & XML as open services and an example of what can be done with XML and PHP together.

While the focus of the presentation is on Meerkat, the O'Reilly Network's "Open Wire Service" that provides searching of RSS channels, much of the detail is applicable to any Web developer wanting to combine PHP and XML.

Dornfest explores Meerkat in the context of Web APIs, showing how technologies like RSS, XML-RPC, HTTP, Apache, MySQL, and other off-the-shelf parts can be combined to help users navigate floods of information, picking out only the parts they need or want.

Dornfest also notes that "While PHP was among the first languages to support XML (James Clark's expat), it is one of the least frequently mentioned languages on XML mailing lists." Activity has picked up lately, with XSLT, XPath, XML-RPC, DOM, and PRAX coming to PHP.

Related stories:

• PHP and XML, technical or cultural gap?
• Java/PHP integration promises richer XML support
• PHP XML interest mailing list
• PHP version of McGrath's Record API for XML (PRAX)
• XML and PHP tutorial: using WDDX