在Apache服务器上使用WebSocket

Question

With all the buzz around WebSockets, it's pretty hard to find a good walkthrough on how to use them with an Apache server on Google.

We're developing a plugin, in PHP (symfony2), which will run from time to time kind of a chat instance. And we find WebSockets more interesting, standard and quick than AJAX for this matter. The thing is, we don't have much sysadmin ressources in our group and we find hard to gather good informations on the following matters:

• Can we run a WebSocket instance on a traditional Apache, dedicated server, and if yes, do you have useful links for us?
• If we need to mod the server, what kind of tools would you recommend knowing that we are not too skilled in sysadmin so we can't afford to have a high maintenance b*** on this.

Thank you very much,

ps: we'll link back to your blog/site as we'll make a technical/informational post on our devblog about this part of our app.

Thank you again!

Answer 1

One path is to use an independent installed web sockets server.

For PHP you can try: http://code.google.com/p/phpwebsocket/ or http://github.com/Devristo/phpws/

There are some other projects which you can try as well.

Basically, you need to upload, unpack and start running the process.

On the frontend, you'll have javascript connecting to the server on the specific port.

Most websocket servers have a demo which echoes back whatever it hears, so this is a good place to write some test code. You may even find a rudimentary chat implementation.

The tricky part is to monitor the web socket server and to make sure it runs smoothly and continuously.

Try to test on as many browsers/devices as possible as this will decide on which websocket server implementation you choose. There are old and new protocols you have to watch out for.