Using PHP with Socket.io

Question

It may be a little late for this question to be answered, but here is what I found.

I don't want to debate on the fact that nodes does that better than php or not, this is not the point.

The solution is : I haven't found any implementation of socket.io for PHP.

But there are some ways to implement WebSockets. There is this jQuery plugin allowing you to use Websockets while gracefully degrading for non-supporting browsers. On the PHP side, there is this class which seems to be the most widely used for PHP WS servers.

If you want to use socket.io together with php this may be your answer!

project website:

elephant.io

they are also on github:

https://github.com/wisembly/elephant.io

Elephant.io provides a socket.io client fully written in PHP that should be usable everywhere in your project.

It is a light and easy to use library that aims to bring some real-time functionality to a PHP application through socket.io and websockets for actions that could not be done in full javascript.

example from the project website (communicate with websocket server through php)

php server

use ElephantIO\Client as Elephant;

$elephant = new Elephant('http://localhost:8000', 'socket.io', 1, false, true, true);

$elephant->init();
$elephant->send(
    ElephantIOClient::TYPE_EVENT,
    null,
    null,
    json_encode(array('name' => 'foo', 'args' => 'bar'))
);
$elephant->close();

echo 'tryin to send `bar` to the event `foo`';

socket io server

var io = require('socket.io').listen(8000);

io.sockets.on('connection', function (socket) {
  console.log('user connected!');

  socket.on('foo', function (data) {
    console.log('here we are in action event and data is: ' + data);
  });
});

UPDATE: Aug 2014 The current socket.io v1.0 site has a PHP example:- https://github.com/rase-/socket.io-php-emitter

If you really want to use PHP as your backend for socket.io ,here are what I found. Two socket.io php server side alternative.

https://github.com/walkor/phpsocket.io

https://github.com/RickySu/phpsocket.io

Exmaple codes for the first repository like this.

use PHPSocketIO\SocketIO;

// listen port 2021 for socket.io client
$io = new SocketIO(2021);
$io->on('connection', function($socket)use($io){
  $socket->on('chat message', function($msg)use($io){
    $io->emit('chat message', $msg);
  });
});