oscon: day 1 - eliminating rails envy with php5

okay, now in a session for php developers -- or maybe rails developers...don't know yet.

this session is from simon minnee from silverstripe, a cms solution provider.  simon quickly adds this disclaimer:

this presentation is not intended to be a language war.  he admits that he is a novice with regard to Rails versus what he's presenting, etc.  de admits, in fact, that his understanding is naive.  he says "i just thought the title would be edgy.  forgive me."

hmm...clever simon, clever -- got me in the door.

he talks about their choice using PHP over Rails:

simon talks first about the use of the PHP5 __call() method...essentially enabling the creation of 'magic methods' that are implicitly defined.  i'm not really getting this as i can't read the code from afar and he's covering it pretty fast.  apparently the decks are available at http://silverstripe.com/rails-envy. 

now we're talking aggregation -- adding versioning to DataObject (as an example -- admittedly criminally oversimplified).

okay, 20 minutes later and he's done with his talk...um, wow.  no envy elimination here.  simon mentioned some stuff with defineMethods functions that i think if i had a deeper understanding of the benefits...i'm not sure this session did a service to other merits of PHP5.