Processes under non-UNIX operating system

Hello all, I was disappointed to know that other than UNIX, PHP doesn't support processes, unless I don't have the latest news. For my particular needs, and after investigating many sources, I see that processes are my friend. My needs comprise of the following: 1) being able to listen on a specific port (use of 'sockets' module, available for all OS's) 2) being able to listen to more than one connection on a particular port (sockets) 3) being able to simultaneously serving more than one connection 4) each connection might take some time to finish, so I don't want a bottleneck Based on the above guidelines, this looks much like a HTTP server, but it's not. So, if I wish to create such a framework that would work in UNIX as well as other OS's, what are my options in PHP? (I still can code that in C, but I prefer PHP.) Thanks, Noor