What kind of cool stuff can I do with PHP's streams?

Question

It seems that PHP's streams aren't used much, but they appear to be very powerful. Does anyone have an example of implementing a stream to do something that would be clunky otherwise?

I don't mean doing stuff like file_get_contents('http://google.com');, I mean implementing your own streams.

Answer 1

A couple of examples that spring immediately to mind are:

• Accessing files with an Amazon S3 wrapper.

• Interacting with MongoDB's GridFS.

• Talking to Microsoft Excel.

• Getting blobs from Windows Azure.