Dynamic server response

[php_nub_qq]

Hi. Can anybody tell me how I can make the server send out data to connected users upon an event? The case is say 2 people are sending messages, chatting, instead of having ajax calls every second is there a way to tell the server when to display new messages? I believe in order for this to happen the browser has to not close the connection to the server but as my nickname states I'm not that good and I don't know how to do this hence I'm asking

[trq]

The technology your looking for is called websockets. http alone is stateless, and there is no such thing as keeping a connection alive.

 

I believe there are a few libraries around for php which handle this. Ive not used any though.

 

Ratchet is the first result I found on Github. https://github.com/cboden/Ratchet

[php_nub_qq]

Alrighty so in order to use websockets I need to install an extension for the server to support websockets, is this correct?

Edited April 28, 2013 by php_nub_qq

[php_nub_qq]

I watched a bunch of tutorials and this seems so complicated to me. I just want to ask one last thing before I dive into this because I just had an idea that doesn't seem that bad to me but of course I need to ask first. So the idea is that just like polling to send a request from the client but instead of returning the wasteful "no new data" the server goes through an infinite loop with a sleep of say 1 sec and exits the loop only if there's new data? The call from the client will be synchronous ( or asynchronous I don't really know which one lol but basically the one that can't be sent more than once until it's returned ). Is this a good option ?