Setting up your own Web server can be a pain when trying to install PHP, MySQL, Apache, and phpMyAdmin. There are several different applications available that try to make doing this easy by installing all of the above for you, and my favorite has always been EasyPHP. I’ve tried others but EasyPHP is just so, well, easy. :) The only thing that I never liked about it is that they don’t update it very frequently. It has been nearly 2 years since the last version was released and within that time there have been significant updates to all of the included programs. Luckily they have been working on a new version and we should see it available soon, but if you can’t wait any longer to get your Windows server setup in a matter of minutes (with the latest software) then they have posted a Beta version.

bool stream_set_timeout ( resource stream, int seconds [, int microseconds] ) Sets the timeout value on stream, expressed in the sum of seconds and microseconds. Returns TRUE on success or FALSE on failure. When the stream times out, the 'timed_out' key of the array returned by stream_get_meta_data() is set to TRUE, although no error/warning is generated.

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a lightweight XML-based protocol for exchanging structured information between distributed applications over native web protocols, such as HTTP. SOAP specifies the formats that XML messages should use, the way in which they should be processed, a set of encoding rules for standard and application-defined data types, and a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses. Web Services is a modern and very popular technology. The list of protocols and technologies related to Web Services grows every day, but SOAP is probably the most important. It is rapidly becoming the standard protocol for accessing Web Services. It uses XML messages to exchange information across endpoints, and provides several advantages over other binary protocols. RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) support was originally a minor element in the design of SOAP, but this feature is one of the most useful it has today. PHP 5's SOAP extension is the first attempt to implement the SOAP protocol for PHP in C. It has some advantages over the existing implementations written in PHP itself, the main one being speed. The extension is currently marked as experimental, but should gradually become more stable and reliable as time progresses. The SOAP extension implements a large subset of SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2 and WSDL 1.1 specifications. The key goal is to use the RPC feature of the SOAP protocol. WSDL is used where possible in order to make the implementation of Web Services more straightforward.

CSQamp. This package includes Apache HTTP Server 2.0.58, MySQL 5.0.22 and PHP 5.1.4 built to work together. Apache httpd is built with MPM pre-fork and modules to support PHP, SSL and Perl. PHP has support for MySQL. Note, to work with PHP, MySQL included in this package is a 32-bit version. For the database server, we recommend you install the CSQmysql package which is a 64-bit version, allowing the use of larger caches to deliver improved performance for large databases. Note that the CSQamp package will work with the CSQmysql database server.

Many people know from their own experience that it's not easy to install an Apache web server and it gets harder if you want to add MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start.

Learn how to build an Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) Really Simple Syndication (RSS) reader, as well as a Web component that you can place on any Web site to look at the articles in the RSS feeds. The first thing I thought about doing when I read about requesting Extensible Markup Language (XML) from JavaScript code on a Web page was to get some RSS and display it. But I immediately ran into the security issue of XML Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), where a page that comes from www.mysite.com can't address pages from anywhere other than www.mysite.com. My plans to build a generic RSS reader in just the page were dashed. But Web 2.0 is all about ingenuity, and solving the problem of how to create an RSS reader with XMLHTTP teaches a lot about how to program the 2.0 Web. This article walks through the construction of an Ajax-based RSS reader using both XMLHTTP and