Networking

Abstract

You may have turned to this chapter wondering just what PHP could possibly have to offer in regard to networking. After all, aren’t networking tasks largely relegated to languages commonly used for system administration, such as Perl or Python? While such a stereotype might have once painted a fairly accurate picture, these days, incorporating networking features into a web application is commonplace. In fact, web-based applications are regularly used to monitor and even maintain network infrastructures. Furthermore, with the use of the command-line version of PHP. it’s very easy to write advanced scripts for system administration using the favorite language and all the libraries available to do this. Always keen to acknowledge growing user needs, the PHP developers have integrated a pretty impressive array of network-specific functionality.