PHP5 introduced a number of more flexible language constructs that let us create software in more elegant ways. Sam will show you how he used these in the development of his CMS to create a framework to do things that are normally thought to be beyond the reach of "simple" languages like PHP:

• Automatically generate functions based to support manipulation of a data-object model.
• Aggregations – change the behaviour of classes, or add more methods to them, without resorting to inheritance
• Add methods to a class or object at run time

The talk will cover some of the different approaches that he tried to implement this functionality, the pitfalls to be aware of, and explain the implementation currently being used in SilverStripe CMS, and how it is performing in production systems.