PHP and Threads

Hi, Im currently looking at different peices of software for writing a socket server. This will need to be able to handle multiple connections coming in independatly. From my experiance, this is best handled with threading. Would I be right in the assessment that PHP cannot cope with threading sockets (or any multi-threading for that matter) - and are there any plans to add this layer of functionality into PHP at any stage? [My aim is to create a socket server running on a port which can take connections from clients (communicating in XML) running a messaging system between them (either broadcast style to all users, or from user A to users B, C and D] Thank you for your time. -- Dan Hardiker [dhardiker@staff.firstcreative.net] ADAM Software & Systems Engineer First Creative Ltd