| Widget Works |

You may not know this, but PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository, has a whole category of classes devoted specifically to networking. This category contains widgets for a variety of different tasks, ranging from validating IP addresses and performing DNS queries to retrieving mail headers and pinging remote hosts to see whether they're operational.

This article will introduce you to some of these widgets, by taking you on a whistle-stop tour of PEAR's networking tools and demonstrating some of the things they let you do. If you're a developer of Web applications, and if you've ever wished you had a way of accessing basic networking tools like dig, ping, traceroute or whois through PHP, keep reading, because your wishes are about to come true.

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