Kevin Schroeder has a new post today with an excerpt from his book "You Want to do WHAT with PHP?" - the first chapter looking at networking and socket connections.

I'm also woefully behind on blogging. So, to alleviate that I am going to post an excerpt from my upcoming book "You want to do WHAT with PHP?" Today we are going to take a look at Chapter 1.

The sample chapter talks about figuring out the host to netmask relationship relationship by parsing the IP with the ip2long and comparing that to the list of netmasks from an array. Sample code is provided as well as output for reference.

On the DZone's RIAZone there's a recent article from Ryan Stewart looking at combining PHP and Flex and get them talking to one another with the help of PHP's socket functions.

There are a number of ways to communicate between Flex and PHP but one of the more interesting is over sockets. Socket communication lets developers create near real-time communication by pushing information directly to the client. In this article you'll see the basics of how to use PHP as the socket server and connect it to a Flex application.

Using direct socket connections, the client and server communicate directly over a port and any data can be easily passed back and forth over it. This method requires that you set up a policy file for the application for security reasons before it can communicate with the PHP backend. With this in place, the rest is easy. They include the PHP code you'll need to make the socket request handler and how to return a response that the Flex application can read. Code for the Flex application side of things is included as well - a simple application that grabs a "stock price" and plots it on a graph (seen here).

DevShed has posted the third part of their "handling sockets in PHP" series today, taking things one step further than the basic TCP server from before and making a basic web server.

They start with a quick look back, mentioing what the simple TCP server could do and (briefly) how it worked, including its entire code. Since it was simple to extend, they create a new class, WebServer, to add the functionality it needs to response as a web server. It's made to serve up one file - a static HTML - whenever the user hits it with a request.

His simple server dosen't conform to any of the standards, but it does transmit data out over the standard port in an HTML format. It's a step in the right direction...

DevShed has posted the third part of their "handling sockets in PHP" series today, taking things one step further than the basic TCP server from before and making a basic web server.

They start with a quick look back, mentioing what the simple TCP server could do and (briefly) how it worked, including its entire code. Since it was simple to extend, they create a new class, WebServer, to add the functionality it needs to response as a web server. It's made to serve up one file - a static HTML - whenever the user hits it with a request.

His simple server dosen't conform to any of the standards, but it does transmit data out over the standard port in an HTML format. It's a step in the right direction...

Devshed has posted part two in their series of "handling sockets in PHP", this time, with a focus on the creation of a TCP server.

The tutorial walks you through the simple process, looking back at the simple version they made before, looking forward at expaning it to handle multiple client requests, and creating a "socket server" class to automatically handle the creation of the socket.

Devshed has posted part two in their series of "handling sockets in PHP", this time, with a focus on the creation of a TCP server.

The tutorial walks you through the simple process, looking back at the simple version they made before, looking forward at expaning it to handle multiple client requests, and creating a "socket server" class to automatically handle the creation of the socket.