I have a school project where i need to create an instant webbased messageing system.
Ive looked into PHP sockets to complete this task PHP socket manual
From these im starting to see a pattern. As you well know PHP can only run once (from top to bottom) and from these examples i can see that a while loop is what makes the socket listen for new connections. (meaning the php script
never stops) these examples the echo the output of the socket.
as far as i can see this is great if you just want a plain site.
However this is not the case. I want to build this application using JavaScript to "ask" the socket if there is any new messages and if there is then render the messages accordingly.
Since im very new to PHP sockets im not sure if this should be done purely by PHP or if it is possible to use JavaScript to listen to the socket (via Ajax) and then print the output as a JSON
?