How would you go about creating a site like this?

carlmango11

Hey,

I'm working on an application at the moment. It consists of a mobile app, a config website (unimportant for sake of question), and a sort of 'status' site. The status site needs to update whenever the mobile app submits data to the server.

The mobile app submits its data to a PHP script at the moment. Is there any way for this script to trigger an update on the status site? Like a sort of push notification structure?

It seems socket.io could do this for me, but I think that would essentially mean having two servers running. Also the other website (that I said was unimportant :pac:) is in PHP so I'd like to stick with this language if possible.

The alternative is to just have the status page refresh every 2/3 seconds which seems a bit sh*t. Or is it? Maybe a bit of AJAX would be fine?

Anyone have any insights? Cheers

Graham

If you've no objection to cloud/3rd party services, take a look at firebase.com

carlmango11

Thanks for the suggestion. Funny I've actually just found a similar service called Pusher which I got doing exactly what I need in <5 minutes. It's not free though

Graham

If I remember correctly, both have a free plan for low volumes.

If neither suits your requirements, here's a few more

http://www.leggetter.co.uk/real-time-web-technologies-guide

croo

I never actually tried but I had thought this was now easily achieved via HTML5's Server Sent Events

Graham

croo wrote: »

I never actually tried but I had thought this was now easily achieved via HTML5's Server Sent Events

No Internet Explorer support though which pretty much rules out the entire corporate market in Ireland.

croo

Maybe the OP is lucky and not working in corporate Ireland.

colm_c

Depending on what you want to do (and it's only for UI purposes), you could store whatever info you need on the realtime setup in a DB/redis/memecache.

Then just use a js call to read this every x amount of seconds to get it to be (almost) realtime. Effectively this is what sockets io does (although sockets io provides a server and client and is a bit more sophisticated).

carlmango11

Thanks for the responses and sorry for the delay in replying - haven't had a chance to even look at the project lately.

colm_c wrote: »

Depending on what you want to do (and it's only for UI purposes), you could store whatever info you need on the realtime setup in a DB/redis/memecache.

Then just use a js call to read this every x amount of seconds to get it to be (almost) realtime. Effectively this is what sockets io does (although sockets io provides a server and client and is a bit more sophisticated).

Thanks, I'll look into this. Or might end up going with a 3rd party.

croo wrote: »

Maybe the OP is lucky and not working in corporate Ireland.

One of the lucky ones :pac:

Overflow

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