Andi Gutmans (pictured), who leads the PHP Collaboration Project and Zend product strategy and has been a leading contributor to PHP since 1997 and spearheaded the object-oriented improvements for PHP 5, explained at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 East how PHP is a cornerstone technology in developing AJAX-enabled Web sites.

"PHP powers some of the most demanding Web 2.0 sites including Yahoo! and Facebook," Gutman reminded the audience of the first ever "Web 2.0" track at AJAXWorld.

One of the reasons for PHP's ease-of-use has been its two-tier deployment model, Gutmans explained. Now, due to the nature of AJAX-enabled Web applications, he said, these apps are becoming three-tier applications which has additional challenges.

Gutmans not only covered some of the PHP features which make it a successful back-end for AJAX applications, but also covered some of the exciting work which is going on - both in the Zend Framework and in Eclipse - which are going to provide much better frameworks and tools for building such applications.