Creating/Managing private rooms using Ratchet?

Question

I am making iOS chat application. After doing study on needed technology and protocols, I decided to give a websockets try. For reasons our stack top is php based and I came to know about ratchet as websockets for PHP. I made simple chat server for ios front-end from reading documentation. Chat is working very fine and I am comfortable with it too. I wanted to know on how to create separate private chat rooms. Will different instance of socket event loop needed to run for separate rooms ?

The sample server I made is using single event loop for managing user connections and dispatching messages to different connection/user id's. I really tried to look out for creating private chat rooms but haven't found any information where I could be confident.

Will I have to manage each connection/user id's virtually on this event loop, like deciding which users can chat to each other directly by controlling the dispatching of messages ? Or is their really a separate way to do this ? This is the event loop sample as per documentation that I implemented:

   <?php
   use Ratchet\Server\IoServer;
   use Ratchet\Http\HttpServer;
   use Ratchet\WebSocket\WsServer;
   use MyApp\Chat;
   
       require dirname(__DIR__) . '/vendor/autoload.php';
   
       $server = IoServer::factory(
           new HttpServer(
               new WsServer(
                   new Chat()
               )
           ),
           8080
       );
   
       $server->run();

I want to tell that I am a iOS/Android developer and really no expert or have fluent knowledge on web frontend/backend technologies.

Answer 1

Will different instance of socket event loop needed to run for separate rooms ?

No. Only one loop is needed. Your snippet is fine. What you have to do is to adjust Chat class so that it accepts additional parameter from the user input - room id/name.

For example, a user sends the message {"cmd":"msg", "message":"Hi", "room": 1}, then Chat should send the message only to the users who joined that room. And, of course, you should implement other user methods, such as {"cmd":"join", "room": 1}, {"cmd":"leave", "room": 1}