Ok, so I'm in the starting stage of a new project where I have an apache web server with PHP included and a MySQL database.
The main focus aim of this project is to show data in this MySQL database as real time on the web page. The problem I have is I am not allowed to install any new software on the server, so I cannot use nodejs or socket.io
I've been looking at the PHP long polling possibility, but I'm curious if anyone out there has managed to pull off something similar without grinding their server to a halt due to too many threads being used.
I've heard about comet, but not sure how that would work as from reading it seems to just look at flat files, not databases.
Thanks for any help.