Section 16.0. Introduction

16.0. Introduction

Before there was HTTP, there was FTP, NNTP, IMAP, POP3, and a whole alphabet soup of other protocols. Many people quickly embraced web browsers because the browser provided an integrated program that let them check their email, read newsgroups, transfer files, and view documents without worrying about the details surrounding the underlying means of communication. PHP provides functions, both natively and through PEAR, to use these other protocols. With them, you can use PHP to create web frontend applications that perform all sorts of network-enabled tasks, such as looking up domain names or sending web-based email. While PHP simplifies these jobs, it is important to understand the strengths and limitations of each protocol.

Recipes 16.1 to 16.3 cover the most popular feature of all: email. 16.1 shows how to send basic email messages. Recipe 16.2 describes MIME-encoded email, which enables you to send plain text and HTML-formatted messages. The IMAP and POP3 protocols, which are used to read mailboxes, are discussed in 16.3.

The next two recipes discuss how to read newsgroups with NNTP. Newsgroups are similar to mailing lists, but instead of every person on the list receiving an email message, people can access a news server and view just the messages they're interested in. Newsgroups also allow threaded discussions, so its easy to trace a conversation through the archives. Recipe 16.4 discusses posting messages, while Recipe 16.5 covers retrieving messages.

Recipe 16.6 covers how to exchange files using FTP (file transfer protocol), which is a method for sending and receiving files across the Internet. FTP servers can require users to log in with a password or allow anonymous usage.

Searching LDAP servers is the topic of Recipe 16.7, while Recipe 16.8 discusses how to authenticate users against an LDAP server. LDAP servers are used as address books and as centralized stores for user information. They're optimized for information retrieval and can be configured to replicate their data to ensure high reliability and quick response times.

The chapter concludes with recipes on networking. Recipe 16.9 covers DNS lookups, both from domain name to IP and vice versa. Recipe 16.10 tells how to check if a host is up and accessible with PEAR's ping module.

Other parts of the book deal with some network protocols as well. HTTP is covered in detail in Chapter 13. Those recipes discuss how to fetch URLs in a variety of different ways. Protocols that combine HTTP and XML are covered in Chapters 14 and 15. Those two chapters discuss consuming and serving web services, including the REST, SOAP, and XML-RPC protocols.