Is there a way to emulate the 'whois' tool using php?

I don't have whois installed on my server (apparently it's in the works but no real news on it). I was wondering if anybody knew a way to emulate the functionality of it though. I figured I'd be posting some data to a url but I don't know what, or where.

Basically I'm at a complete loss, and would appreciate any help or even something that I could look into.

You can use the PHP Whois API. This will allow you access to all the whois records. To use that function there is a link at the bottom of that page to a class. Make sure you include that too.