Havard Eide shares a tool he originally created to do function lookups when in vim - phpm:

4 years ago I wrote a small program called phpm that I used for php function lookup when coding in vim. since then I've crossed over to ZendStudio and I'm now using that for my everyday work. But: every now and then I've had requests regarding phpm and if I can't digg up the sources, and I've said: "sorry, but those are lost". Until today: I went through a old HD, digging through backups and files: and suddenly phpm resurfaced!

He's included the links to the three things you'll need to get it working - the phpm file itself, XML required by it and an optional phpdocumentor template to create the output file.

On PHPBuilder.com today, there's a new tutorial spotlighting the use of the cURL library with PHP:

cURL is one of the most powerful PHP extensions. It stands for Client URL, and allows you to communicate with other servers using a wide range of protocols. Perhaps that sounds fairly uninteresting, but give it some more thought.

As food for thought, they give a few examples of the use of this handy library - a script to look up the meaning of a word, how to access password protected pages, getting the information about a file from a remote server, posting to a remote script, and FTPing a file to a remote server. This flexible library allows all of these without making things overly complex and unmanageable.

You can check out the full list of features for the extension on this page of the PHP manual.

Joshua Eichorn has found a tutorial someone else has written on creating a stock lookup plugin for WordPress with his HTML_AJAX package.

The only problem I see is the code won't work in PHP5 since introspection will return the method name as GetQuote instead of getquote.

He gives the code changes you'll need to make to get it all working in your PHP5 installation, and includes another option as well - registering all of the functions you want to use instead of just automagically using them.