I am working on a project where i am trying to build an interface like If user is logged in and in between that if sever has any message for that user then the user will get notify immediately (Like facebook ) so for i am going through websockets but confused from where should i start ? please suggest me some basic ideas ?
I am using PHP as a language for implementation
I'm looking for advice at the moment on achieving real-time notifications using a mix of PHP, NodeJS and socket.io.
At the moment I have done next to nothing with Node and socket.io so I'm at a loss with the best way to achieve this. I've done some basically listening and what not but nothing extreme.
For now my questions are:
How will socket.io know of new notifications, should PHP be responsible for sending the data (say a post was created) to socket.io and from there broadcasting to connected clients?
How does socket.io know which clients want the notifications?
I'm really not sure what else. This is all a bit much for me at the moment. I just can't get my head around how the notifications will be distributed.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I don't expect a detailed walk through, just a push in the right direction or some knowledge on how it all meshes.
Start from reading what is websockets, how they work, what browser support. The internet is full for this information.
For php implementation, take a look at the http://socketo.me/. PHP is not best suited for socket communication. I would use nodejs+socket.io and php for 'regular stuff'. Don't be afraid to mix technologies, there is no hammer for all problems.
Edit:
If you don't know nodejs then it could be hard, but it's worth your time to learn it.
Some ideas:
You can create table with notifications on your database, then if some event acccurs, ex. post added add record there (like number of new posts, and user_id), then from nodejs side connect to database fetch database and look for notifications for current user.
Then nodejs notifies listening clients about changes (socket.io)
If user reviews new posts update counter to 0, (something similar what facebook does when you have new message), and then nodejs will know that there are no new post, so nothing to notify.
The hardest part is to get current user session.
Some related:
http://socket.io/
What MySQL drivers are available for node.js?
Sharing data between php and node.js via cookie securely
Authenticate user for socket.io/nodejs
Socket IO send to specified user ID
Related
I am currently creating an app where 2 users will have the ability to chat with one another. Specifically, it will be an iOS app using Swift as the main language. Most chat app tutorials on the web recommend using Firebase but I personally want to use MySQL since the rest of my database activities for this app are done using MySQL. I also do not want to use any existing libraries and want to do this all on my own.
I only have questions regarding the efficiency of using MySQL. When accessing the database, I create a URLSession using swift which then uses a predetermined link that points to my PHP scripts on the backend to handle the database accessions. The only problem with this is that my chat functionality of the app will have to refresh messages (to see messages that the other user has sent you within a second or so). I am confused as how to go about this. My current idea is to have a Timer that calls the URLSession data task every second or so to retrieve new messages from the database then display them on the user's screen. Would this be efficient or is there a better way to do this? I feel as if this would bog down MySQL in some way and would over all slow down the efficiency of the database. Is there a better way to go about this?
Thanks in advance.
If you really want to use MYSQL as a way of delivering messages then you can look into #TekShock's comment about using Apple's PushNotifications. You can also use Long Polling however it is not favorable at all.
I personally would not use MYSQL as a way of delivering messages just because there is a lot more better options. You can pick from messaging protocols like XMPP and MQTT to deliver your messages. I have personally have used MQTT in the past and thought it was really simple to get the hang and will fit your needs perfectly. It has a couple of really good swift clients like SwiftMQTT. You will have each device subscribe and publish to a room so it can receive and send messages. So in your case you can have a User A subscribe to ROOM 1 and a User B subscribe to the same room and they will both receive all the messages published to that specific room.
You can then if you want to store delivered messages to a MYSQL db so when the user opens the app back up you can load all their previous messages. You can also use Sqlite or Realm to store these messages locally instead of storing them online.
EDIT:
Scaling is also pretty simple with MQTT if this is something you will consider. You could place a queuing system between your application and the MQTT broker, possibly something like Apache Kafka which would be your best bet.
I'm developing an app that will have a way to message other users. I've done this before but I think I can improve on the method of sending/receiving the data. Before what I did is I had a table with all the messages and the ones that were associated with the conversation ID would be displayed in an individual conversation. On the client side, I'd have a timer that would constantly ask the server for an update.
I guess my question is this: Is there a better way than to keep asking my server if there is an update? I mean.. a lighter way. I was considering using push notifications but if the user disables APNS, their messages won't update.
http://reactphp.org/
Is useful for event driven socket based communication. It would involve storing connected clients in some kind of data structure (see here) and on an event, such as a change to data, notifying connected clients that should know about the event, in the manner of a push.
http://socketo.me/ is built on top of react
http://socketo.me/docs/flow
has a good diagram of how socket based connections work. This might be better than polling repeatedly from all the connected clients, based on your use case.
I am a PHP developer and the title basically says it all. However I was hoping on some more in-depth information as I am starting to get confused about how the flow for the project I work on should go.
For an (web) application I need to implement a feature like Facebook does it with notifying users about replies/comments and instantly showing these.
I figured I could use long-polling with ajax requests but this does not seem to be a nice solution as the notifications never really are instant and it is resource heavy.
So I should use some form of sockets if I understand correctly, and Node.Js would be a good choice. So based on the last assumption I now get confused about the work flow.
I thought about two possible solutions:
1) It seems to me, that if I would use Node.Js I could skip using PHP at all and base the application on Node.js only.
2) Or I could use PHP as a base and only use Node.js for notifying users and instantly showing messages but saving the data using PHP and Mysql.
These two possibilities confuse me and I can't make up my mind about what would be the "best" and cleanest way.
I do not have much experience in Node.js, played with it for a while. But managing and saving data seems to be hard in Node.js so that is why I came up with option 2.
I know Facebook is build on PHP so I am assuming that they save the data via PHP and notify / instantly show replies and comments via Node.
Could someone help me out on this?
Thanks in advance!
EDIT:
I just noticed, Stackoverflow does something similar. I get a notification in the upper left, and below my question a box with "new answer to this question". I am really interested in the technologie(s) used.
Well you could use node.js for the notifications and PHP for your app.
By googling I found this about real-time-notifications.
You could also just use node.js with socket.io, but this means that you have to learn new technologies as you mention that you have no experience with node.
I haven't used it but you could check this project, for websockets in PHP.
When you have an update that you want to notify users you can use the publish subscriber pattern to notify the intrested in this update.
Take a look in Gearman too.
Personally, I've built a notification system using the pubsub mechanism of redis, with node.js+socket.io. Everytime that there is an update on a record then there is a publish on the appropriate channel. If the channel has listeners then they will be notified. I also store the last 20 notifications in a Redis list.
The appplication is built in PHP. The notification system is built in node.js. They are different applications that see the same data. The communication occurs via redis. For example in the Facebook context:
1) A user updates his status.
2) PHP stores this to the database and Redis
3) Redis knows that this update must publish to the status channel of the specific user and it does.
4) All the friends of the specific user are listening to his status channel (here comes node.js)
5) Node.js pushes the notification in the browser with socket.io
As for facebook, I have read in an article that is using long polling for supporting older browsers. Not sure for this though, needs citation...
AFAIK It would be via two simple methods :
First one that could be very simple is adding a Boolean column to each record that determines if it has been notified or not.
The second method is creating a table to insert all notifications.
However, I'm not sure if there are alternative methods for better performance, But first method is what I do commonly myself. But I think Facebook is using 2nd method, because it has to notify each one to a lot of users.
Your question maybe dublicate of:
Facebook like notifications tracking (DB Design)
Database design to store notifications to users
You could use Server Side Events it involves a bit of JavaScript but nothing overly complicated I think.
The main bulk of this method is PHP though, so you would just use the PHP to query your DB for notifications and SSE will push them to the user.
It does have some limitations though, most notably it's not supported by IE (huge surprise) thought i'd mention it anyway to let you know of other possibilities.
Hope this helps
Im starting a new project very soon, and im considering long polling to notify the users that they have a new private message/Notification that they have to check, really similar to how Facebook uses to notify you that someone has posted something about you/Liked a photo of you..
From what I have read, cometd seemed like a really good option to start with.
Then, other ways started emerging, like: Socket.io, and node.js ..
Now, my question is; Which one do you think is the best option for this case and why?
What I need to do exactly is the following;
User 1 logs into their account
User 2 sends User 1 a message which gets stored into the database and a flag is generated, (If possible?!)
The PHP script responsible for User 1 should pick up the flag, and push a notification to User 1
I know how to take care of the javascript side, but I have never done anything similar to long polling.
Im using jQuery as javascript library and PHP for the server side.
So recommendations and any good resources to do this?
It would be beneficial to use a combination of php and also node.js. node.js is made for use with persistant connections, and push communication instead of poll.
http://nodejs.org/
Here is a quick video i found: http://vimeo.com/29099827
I'd like to create an application where when a Super user clicks a link the users should get a notification or rather a content like a pdf for them to access on the screen.
Use Case: When a teacher wants to share a PDF with his students he should be able to notify his students about the pdf available for download and a link has to be provided to do the same.
There are several ways you can accomplish this. The most supported way is through a technique called Comet or long-polling. Basically, the client sends a request to the server and the server doesn't send a response until some event happens. This gives the illusion that the server is pushing to the client.
There are other methods and technologies that actually allow pushing to the client instead of just simulating it (i.e. Web Sockets), but many browsers don't support them.
As you want to implement this in CakePHP (so I assume it's a web-based application), the user will have to have an 'active' page open in order to receive the push messages.
It's worth looking at the first two answers to this, but also just think about how other sites might achieve this. Sites like Facebook, BBC, Stackoverflow all use techniques to keep pages up to date.
I suspect Facebook just uses some AJAX that runs in a loop/timer to periodically pull updates in a way that would make it look like push. If the update request is often enough (short time period), it'll almost look realtime. If it's a long time period it'll look like a pull. Finding the right balance between up-to-dateness and browser/processor/network thrashing is the key.
The actual request shouldn't thrash the system, but the reply in some applications may be much bigger. In your case, the data in each direction is tiny, so you could make the request loop quite short.
Experiment!
Standard HTTP protocol doesn't allow push from server to client. You can emulate this by using for example AJAX requests with small interval.
Have a look at php-amqplib and RabbitMQ. Together they can help you implement AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol). Essentially your web page can be made to update by pushing a message to it.
[EDIT] I recently came across Pusher which I have implemented for a project. It is a HTML5 WebSocket powered realtime messaging service. It works really well and has a free bottom tier plan. It's also extremely simple to implement.
Check out node.js in combination with socket.io and express. Great starting point here