PHP 5 in Practice

13. Web Services and Other Protocols Because PHP is so closely associated with web development and information delivery, interfaces have been developed that allow PHP to access many more Internet protocols than just HTTP. In general, protoco...

13.1. Submitting a POST HTTP Request with cURL Situations exist where you may need, in the middle of a PHP script, to send data to another server and retrieve the response. This is often the case when dealing with a third-party vendor, such as a...

13.2. Communicating with an LDAP Server LDAP stands for the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. It is used to talk with directory services for retrieving and modifying data. It is not a relational database system. LDAP is simply a system that p...

13.3. Using Web Services Via SOAP SOAP is a protocol commonly used to communicate with web services, typically over an HTTP connection. Web services are a way for machines to provide functions that can be called remotely from any other machine. Th...

13.4. Connecting to an FTP Server There are many ways to connect to an FTP server in PHP. One is using the cURL package, discussed in Section 13.1, "Submitting a POST HTTP Request with cURL," earlier in the chapter, which not only handle...

13.5. Creating a PHP-Based FTP Client Although Listing 13.4.1 is easy to use, it is limited to just being used for putting, or retrieving files, one at a time. There are times when you need to do more with an FTP server, such as getting directory ...

13.6. Using Sockets to Connect to an Internet Server If you need to talk to an Internet service other than the ones mentioned so far, such as http, ftp, SOAP, and so on, you will need to directly access this service via TCP or UDP sockets. This is...

13.7. Creating Your Own Basic Web Server Purely as an example of what you can do in PHP using the stream and socket functionality, we will create a web server in PHP. Listing 13.7.1 will be a basic web server, serving only GET requests and basic f...