In this latest post to his site, Hannes Magnusson looks briefly at an interesting use for PHP's streams functionality - reading data from a MongoDB connection as a streaming resource.

PHP Streams have several pretty nifty features that most people don't really know about; Filters, Wrappers, Context, and Notifications. Documenting these is a bit difficult, and getting the user to discover these features is even more problematic, as these things usually live outside of the normal path (function reference). Maybe I'll blog about these things in the future, but for now I want to talk about the Stream (context) Notifications - or more specifically; Stream Notifications in the MongoDB extension for PHP.

He talks some about what stream notifications are on a basic level and some general use cases for them. From there he moves into the MongoDB world and some changes in the mongodb 1.4 extension over to using streams. He also talks about some of the things coming in the 1.5 version including progress reporting for read/write actions.