A common PHP-powered website is expected to run a script on the server, its content being rendered as HTML, the output is displayed and connection is closed

Using Ratchet, a WebSockets library for PHP, the connection stays open and both the client + server can push data to each other which is perfect for live-apps.

Ratchet - PHP WebSockets

It consists of multiple components including:

  • IoServer (the core to handle the events)
  • WsServer (for communicating with W3C WebSocket API)
  • SessionProvider (for handling the sessions)
  • WampServer (provides the RPC and PubSub patterns)
  • FlashPolicy (Flash fallback for unsupported browsers)
  • IpBlackList (prevent any IPs from opening connections)

Ratchet is very well-documented and a nice chat demo exists which show its capabilities.

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