On the PHPClasses.org website there's a new entry covering, among other things, one handy feature PHP includes to let developers read and write their data more flexibly - streams.

This article explains what are stream handlers and how they simplify PHP developers lives by allowing PHP applications to easily read and write data from containers, like remote Web pages or e-mail messages, as if they were files. [...] The article also presents more examples of cool stream handlers classes submitted to the PHPClasses site by several authors.

He describes the abstraction that the streams interface allows, how they can make your life easier, a real-life example of streams in action (working with POP3) and some of the classes that have been contributed to PHPClasses.org that use them.