I read an article on Yahoo! Developer Network about using PHP Proxy for Yahoo! web services. In order to use the example code provided by that article, developers must have PHP cURL library installed (the article can be found here).

An alternative for cURL would be fopen()-an old school way to make a PHP Proxy, it is the build-in PHP function, but for security reasons, many serious web development enviroments have disabled fopen() feature.  At the time I worked with developers from Yahoo! on the project Pinoy Connect, cURL is the required library function for security reasons. 

I coded a simple ajax application to retrieve Yahoo! RSS using fopen(), you can download the source code and try out on your own. Got a demo page? Sorry, not this time. Not just Yahoo!, even the server host of this blog you are currently reading doesn’t allow fopen(). But don’t worry, i tested it out on my localhost, it works fine. Enjoy!