HTML5 websockets vs PHP websockets vs node.js websockets?

Question

I have decided to use WebSockets for my website chat application and I have just started to learn websockets, but I have three different options, node.js , PHP or HTML5.

What I want to know that is there any difference between the three, I mean I don't want to learn all the three if any one is better than the others.

Answer 1

Web Sockets is a protocol which defines how two parties can communicate. It's language agnostic; any language can provide an adapter to talk to another web socket. The three things you mention are three different implementations for of this adapter. For a chat application, you'll likely need at least two of them: one server, one client. Choose which language you'd like to write your server in (PHP or Node.js) and use the HTML 5 web sockets feature in the browser to talk to the server.