I am developing a sort of social media website. You can see someone's profile, you can rate the profile, you can submit a comment on their profile etc. So a sort of facebook thing.
All my actions are done with AJAX calls. Now I created a PHP websocket server for private chat. Now is my question what do you think about replace all the AJAX calls to calls to the websocket server? So each user action goes via websockets. Is this good or wrong? What about when 5 people clicking on the same profile at the same time, does this have any consequence to the socket server? Is the socket server able to handle all those actions mentioned above at the same time?
Need your thoughts on this, thank you.
Related
I need some help with refreshing data. I have an app in Swift 2.0 and I want to the server send an action and execute a method in the app. I already try with push notification and It works greate but if the user disable the notification the method still execute? and according my knowledge this method is only execute when you press the notification. What is the best way to acomplish this?
I am trying to avoid that the app constantly request data from the server.
My server is in PHP.
Thanks!
I think you can use protocols/delegates.
Delegates are good ways to be notified only when needed and and alternative to notifications.
Go check for more here :
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/Protocols.html
With this scenario I think we have these locations to request for updates:
At appDelegate, overriding applicationDidBecomeActive, called when the app becomes active in foreground.
In the view didAppear from the main view from our app (the first view that appears when we open our app).
Both options make more requests to the server than they should, but maybe the 1st is the least costly because is called just when app becomes active, and this is a good moment to check for updates.
I have an app where basically players challenge each other. At some point their challenge completes and I need to provide them (both of them - there are two players) with an update message, like 'Hey, you won and got 100500 points'. And vice versa - "Hey You looose"
I use websockets and pusher api to tackle the live updates, this works perfectly when player is "online". But what if they are not? The way to go for me looks like I can still handle the event with pusher and instead just displaying the message, I can store it to db to table challenge_notifications with fields messages and seen = 0. it's ok, but what would be the best way then to show this to the player when he comes online next time? I don't want to have ajax request on every page load checking to see if there are any unseen notifications for the user.
I probably somehow need to fetch all pending notifications only once, when they get online?
I use Laravel 5 for my backend.
There was a recent post on the Pusher blog about how to detect if a user is online or not using the Pusher HTTP API: Enabling Smart Notifications with Pusher and SendGrid.
The example uses SendGrid, but you could instead store the update to a database, send them a Push Notification, an SMS etc.
what would be the best way then to show this to the player when he comes online next time?
I guess there are two forms of "coming online":
The user is no longer on the site and has to navigate to the site. In that case as the page loads you can query the DB and serve them up any missed notifications directly (this would seem the easiest solution). Or, if it fits your app architecture, make a single AJAX request when the page loads to get any missed notifications.
If the user has gone offline due to them being mobile or having a bad network connection. In that case you can bind to the connected event using pusher.connection.bind('connected', function() {}); and then make a query to see if they've missed any notifications.
In summary: it would seem that querying the DB for any missed notifications upon normal page render (on the server) would be the simplest solution and wouldn't required much resource usage. But there are alternative mechanisms of delivering a notifications (email, SMS) if they're not online.
I have a website running on shared server with apache/mysql/php. Each of the pages of the site belongs to one registered user and this user,once logged in can edit the page. Other users that are not owners of the page can only look at these pages but cannot do anything else.
Now I'm planning to add chat functionality to my application. The basic idea is that if owner of the page opens it in a browser, and is logged in, he will be shown for other users (that will be anonymous) as "available for chat". Other users visiting the page will be able to send him messages and vice versa. Anonymous users do not need to communicate with each other and they can communicate only with registered user (owner of the page). So basic structure would be like that:
anonymous user(s) visits the page. Registered owner of the page is not looking at the same page and chat is not available.
Registered owner logs in and opens his page in a browser. All registered users in real time are informed owner is available for chat now.
Anonymous users can send him messages.
Registered user receives the messages and can respond back to each user
Other users can join and chat with registered user any time. It all happens in real time and registered user can see who comes in to visit his page and goes away.
Now, in step 3 and 4 I need to know if the registered user is still logged in. If so then the messages can be passed further to intended user. If not then instead I need to send a message that the owner (registered user) is no longer available for chat.
I'm looking for advice on how to best implement it:
using old school php and ajax calls. So every user would send ajax request every second or so to server and server would keep track of each conversation somehow. Relatively easy to implement I think. I'm not expecting large number of users but I can imagine this would be heavy on the server.
using node.js.
Now my questions:
What could be possible problem with solution 1 above. Would that be too heavy on a server constantly throwing ajax requests at it? would would be reasonable number of users I could accept?
Using node js on my shared hosting.. assuming its possible to install it and run it on separate port, how would I best go about checking if registered user is still logged in or not? Any ideas would be much appreciated as am out of ideas here.
You're right that the PHP/Ajax calls can cause quite a bit of server load, especially if your Apache/PHP stack needs a lot of memory to bootstrap. Many chat modules in PHP systems, e.g. Drupal, actually offload this responsibility onto a specialized node.js server (the second approach you mentioned) to facilitate scaling.
Another approach you may consider is to use a real-time network such as PubNub to facilitate this user-to-user data transfer. PubNub has a toolkit called Presence which can help with telling who is subscribed or unsubscribed to each channel.
To fit this to your requirements, I imagine that each user will register with the page they are viewing upon landing on it, by issuing this call in your JavaScript:
<script src="https://cdn.pubnub.com/pubnub.min.js"></script>
<script>
var pubnub = PUBNUB({
uuid : '12345-page35' //You can define this for each user
})
pubnub.subscribe({
channel : 'site-wide-chat,page35', //Subscribe to two channels!
message : receive_chat, //Callback function
presence : user_joined //Callback function
})
</script>
When the "owner" logs in the other users viewing the page are notified. You can accomplish that like this:
function user_joined(event) {
if (event.uuid.match(/page35/)) { //You can set your own test here
// .... admin available for chat
}
}
Presence also has a bunch of nifty features such as the ability to get all users subscribed to the current channel:
pubnub.here_now({
channel : 'page35',
callback : function(m){console.log(m)}
});
I hope this helps you build your minimum viable product. Since everything is implemented at the programming language level, you should have a lot of flexibility crafting a customizable chat solution without adding additional complexity or overhead on your server.
I am trying to implement a Facebook-like live notifications system to notify users whenever someone adds them as friend, like their post or posts replies to their comments.
All the database and PHP part is done, but I can't figure out how to implement it like Facebook has.
Whenever someone likes/comments on your post in Facebook the light blue box appears at the bottom left corner of the screen. This happens as soon as someone hits like button or posts comment in Facebook. I would like to know what I should do to implement this.
Using YUI or any JavaScript framework I can query a database table after n seconds to check for notifications. This method is too heavy.
I was wondering if there is any server side mod or scripting can be done so that whenever there is new notification entry in my database table the server will tell that particular client. That way unnecessary request calls from client to server will be avoided completely and system can work efficiently for website with more than 50,000 users online at a time.
How can I achieve this?
You should look into COMET techniques, such as forever frame (tutorial) and long polling. That allows you to have a form of a server->client push communication.
I am really surprised nobody has mentioned PubNub and Pusher
These two (competitors) are building infrastructure which allows for realtime notifications, just like Facebook.
Facebook notification
You basically set a request up, like callng the service that asks your server/db for the notifications of that user. You may do a while loop that retries if theres no notification (maybe Thread.Sleep in between searches). Your js request will timeout, then you can call the function again in timeout. This means long polling afaik
The only way to do it is to have some sort of mechanism (e.g. Javascript) to repeatedly poll the server for updates. Doing server pushes to web browsers isn't possible.
i need to create a chat application in php+js+ajax which need to be integrated to a site, where am stuck is to create a chat window , that need to be constant while going through different pages in the site . if any one can suggest a better way i will be grateful, thanks in advance
As for the actual chat application...
Using some kind of technology to push data from the server -> your users is the best way to achieve a real-time chat application.
I would highly recommend checking out APE (Ajax Push Engine).
It takes care of the server-side stuff and allows you to seamlessly transfer data from the server -> client.
As far as the chat window staying when you change pages, I can think of three options:
Put the chat in a separate frame and only change the main frame when going to a new page.
Change the page content with AJAX instead of making a full page reload.
Assuming the chat messages are being stored on the server, simply repopulate the chat with the most recent messages after the new page loads.
There are plenty of tutorials available, try one of these three that came up first from a Google search for "php chat tutorial":
http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorials/PHP/Chat-Systems/1
http://code.jenseng.com/jenChat/
http://www.ajaxprojects.com/ajax/tutorialdetails.php?itemid=9