This whole thing started when I began working on an Adobe Air App that was until now a completely single player game. The question I have is whether it is possible to alert a user when it is their turn without using a polling technique ( without continually checking... is it my turn yet? ). The technologies I have at my disposal are pretty much just AIR, PHP, and MySQL. I currently have a shared hosting package with no ssh support in which I am sure I will change soon this year to a dedicated package with ssh support.
With these technologies would that be possible?
The idea / direction I have been going down is.
Setting up a PHP Socket Program to maintain the connection between users and having a common domain the AIR application(s) will connect to. For example. My phone would POST to my.domain.com which would execute a php script to start a Socket Server "exec("php /socket.php"); All users of the application would join a "pool" in the server if it was running in which - my theory is that - I can maintain bidirectional communication with them. The MySQL server can be used to track if the socket is open and who is currently in the pool. Is this possible?
I also think I would not be able to notify users when the app is closed as they would no longer be in the socket.
I'm just wondering if I am way off base here.
If you want to use existing notification ANE, you can get it from here :
It works for both IOS and Android.
And if you want to start from scratch, this link is also useful :