PHP Socket Server for multiple clients

Question

Possible Duplicate:
A PHP Socket Server with Flash Clients

I am building an app in my server with the help of a flash developer, and he asked me to build a socket server to communicate with the database. He recommended me JAVA but I am not very good at JAVA and I was wondering if it was possible to build a Socket Server in PHP.

I should allow connections to multiple TCP client connections. I know in JAVA this is done thought threading, but I am not sure if this can also be achieved with PHP.

Could someone please show me the basic skeleton of a PHP Socket Server with these characteristics?

The connection has to be TCp (persistent) from the beginning of the connection to the app, until the end.

Answer 1

You have to run your socket server as a service from the command line. This is a part of what I have used before. It closes the socket after a read but can easy be modified to keep a array of connections.

• You would have to build some kind of watchdog to see if a connection is still alive.
• You need a identifying mechanism to identify different connections.

The code:

set_time_limit( 0 );
// Set the ip and port we will listen on
$address = '127.0.0.1';
$port = 6789;

// Create a TCP Stream socket
$sock = socket_create( AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0 ); // 0 for  SQL_TCP
// Bind the socket to an address/port
socket_bind( $sock, 0, $port ) or die( 'Could not bind to address' );  //0 for localhost
// Start listening for connections
socket_listen( $sock );

//loop and listen
while (true) {
  /* Accept incoming  requests and handle them as child processes */
  $client = socket_accept( $sock );
  // Read the input  from the client – 1024000 bytes
  $input = socket_read( $client, 1024000 );

  // from here you need to do your database stuff
  // and handle the response 

   // Display output  back to client
  socket_write( $client, $response );
  socket_close( $client );
}
// Close the master sockets
socket_close( $sock );