I am relatively new to node.js and socket.io. Currently I have a half finished private web project, which runs only with PHP with a MySQL database on the server side. I decided to bring it to a more advanced level using socket.io, for several features within the project.
So I read a lot about it and watched a whole bunch of tutorials. Also I found this and this during my research.
My question is, if that is still the common way to develop a web application?
More exactly: to use on one event (like a form submit) both an AJAX request and a socket.emit, for those events it is necessary/wanted.
The background of this thought is the following. I have a whole bunch of calculations running now in PHP. And the node.js server runs logically in JavaScript. So I can easily implement a node.js server without changing anything on my AJAX requests. Or rewrite everything I have so far, to js and use only a node.js server.
But this leads to 3 more questions:
- Which runs possibly faster on the server side. A calculation scripted with PHP or JavaScript?
- How to use transactions on a node.js server while using MySQL?
- And how great is the influence by converting a PHP array to a JSON object, what you could avoid with the usage of just the node.js server where you don't need to convert anything.