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I'm creating a mobile app with a server backend that will authenticate a user and continuously send them updates whilst listening for post data from the mobile app. These updates will be specific to the person, pulled from a database.

From my research it seems that I should use a websocket. I'm familiar with PHP so have tried Ratchet. I've created a simple chat script with Ratchet which queries a database onMessage and sends the data to the client.

My question is, are websockets right for this? When a server receives a connection it must query the db every 5 seconds and send updated info to the app. It must listen for messages that will change the db query. Everything in Ratchet's docs seems to be focussed on subscriptions to topics rather than treating each client individually, although I've gotten around this by using:

$client = $this->clients[$from->resourceId];
$client->send("whatever_message"):

Am I complicating things by using Ratchet? Or should I use a child process to handle each client?

I am sorry for a vague questions. I've researched as best I can but cannot establish whether I'm heading in the wrong direction! Thank you for any help.

ryanxav
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  • I have asked similar question and this was the best solution after testing a lot of methods: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37595585/how-can-i-send-data-text-from-php-using-websocket-to-process – Pini Cheyni Jan 18 '17 at 11:01

1 Answers1

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That is a good formula. Sending post data from the apps while maintaining a socket connection is a good distribution of processes. However PHP might not be your best option for running the socket server.

The reason for this is PHP is a single threaded language which doesn't sport an elegant event system.

Take NodeJs as an alternative. It too is single threaded, however you can register events on socket servers allowing the software to run additional control processes while it waits for network activity.

This does not limit you to javascript however. Work can still be delegated to PHP processes from the NodeJs application (I use NodeJs as an example only, there are other options such as Java, Python, or good ol' native).

For moving work to PHP, you can either execute commands, or use a job server to enable synchronous and asynchronous tasks.

Here are a few resources you can combine to accomplish this:

http://nodejs.org/
http://socket.io/
http://gearman.org/
http://php.net/manual/en/book.gearman.php

And if you are using Symfony:
https://github.com/mmoreram/GearmanBundle

Flosculus
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