In a new posting over on PHP Magazine's website this morning, there's an article about some seldom used PHP extensions had how they can benefit you.

In Sticking the Fork In, the author covers five extensions most people don't even know exist: PCNTL, POSIX, Sockets, SHMOP, and SysVSem. He explains all of them in detail, including examples of how to use them effectively in your code. The sockets example is quite nice, especially for those out there that have ever wanted to make a daemon in PHP.

Each of the examples is intertwined in one large project - the creation of a daemon that spawns child processes and talks between the parent and the child. This is a bit more advanced that the typical "simple socket connection" daemon that I've seen over and over, and it's a nice change to see something a bit more robust. For more details and the code examples for this project, check out the rest of this article...