I will try to make my first post here as interesting as possible.
Lately I have been interested in the feasibility of handling WebSocket requests on a shared hosting server.
Please don't tell me "upgrade your plan". All this would be trivial on at least a VPS. I realize that.
As many know, shared hosts will...
- Kill a daemon if they see one
- Block usage of server sockets
- Deny you shell access
- Keep apache off limits (no module installations)
These restrictions eliminate phpwebsocket, python altogether. A no-daemon solution that masquerades as a web page is needed.
PHP being my favorite server-side language, I crafted a PHP websocket gateway posing as a web page.
So far I have been successful in sending the right headers for the handshake and streaming output (using output buffering), but I still can't figure out how to continue to read data after the initial request.
In short, I want to continue to receive data from the client even after the PHP script is started. I have tried reading the php://input pseudofile, but I can't seem to get any more reads out of it after the end of the GET. Is there any setting or hack that will allow this?
Thanks!
