So, you're a PHP developer, out there, whipping up pages faster than ever before, when suddenly someone drops something on your desk that's a little different. They want you to make this machine talk to that machine - with PHP. How do you do it? Well, this new article from Zend is a step in the right direction.

In Inter-Platform Communication (IPC) Using PHP (there's a mouthful), they step you through creating a simple image processor function that will use an IPC link between a PHP-enabled Web server and a Windows machine. The image processor will be able to load, manipulate (in this example, resize), and save an image file in real time. You will be able to call this function from PHP and receive the processed graphic quickly enough to use it in the result page returned by the PHP script.

This article really is a great place to get started if you need a good example of how to get machines to talk to each other. And, the past part is, they start things off the right way - planning, not just coding.

Thanks to Ewald for the link...