[shmichael]

You're referring to mcurl. It's an absolute necessity unless you want to shell out extra PHP processes. Still, you have to poll it and the code is not friendly.

Ruby is no gem either (I've always wanted to say that), with the one advantage of having dedicated high-level programmers as advocates within the community.

I haven't seen anything close to RoR or Django in PHP. Nor did I see a Twisted or node.js variant.