PHP Sockets and IRC

[nycd]

I'm attempting to write an irc applet for a web site. I have a few ideas down, just curious about some things though. My idea is to use AJAX and run the php script in the background, so latency wouldn't become a proble. I would have javascript request all data that was been recorded to a text file, which then would display on the page. My question is, how exactly would I write to the socket, once the PHP script has already been called and the socket currently open.