Help creating a streaming (or push) API with PHP a

问题:

I'd like to create an API for a project I'm working on, allowing developers to create desktop and mobile applications built around its functionality. One thing I've always wanted to learn how to do is create a stateless, push notification system, similar to Twitter's Streaming API.

Basically, I want to be able to notify users of any changes to the data in real time, or as close to it as possible. I know that this might be difficult on mobile devices, which is why mobile applications will probably be built to check for updates periodically, to save battery. However, desktop applications won't have that limitation. I'd like to avoid making the application ask the server if there is new information, and instead let the server tell the application that there is new data.

My programming language is PHP and my server is Apache. If I absolutely had to I could switch to Lighttpd or nginx, but that's an absolute last resort since it would require a lot of changes to all of my existing code.

I've read this article:

http://www.zeitoun.net/articles/comet_and_php/start

And tested it out, but unfortunately all that happens is my browser keeps attempting to load the page and never actually displays the time. I suspect this is because, for whatever reason, I've never been able to get output buffering to work on my server, unless I send 64kb (or more) of data. I heard that I had to disable gzip, which I did, and it still didn't work, so I don't know.

回答1:

Have a look at some existing technologies to help you do this:

Tornado

Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google's webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying non-blocking infrastructure.

Pusher

Pusher is a hosted API for quickly, easily and securely adding scalable realtime functionality via WebSockets to web and mobile apps.

Both are extremely fast and scalable, and I have setup both relatively easily.

回答2:

Well you could do this in several ways, you could build in a poller at the client side, or you could use something like NodeJS. (http://nodejs.org/) or web sockets.

回答3:

Yeah another good piece is http://socket.io/ and http://elephant.io/ some tuorials like this might also be useful. http://www.phpbuilder.com/articles/application-architecture/optimization/creating-real-time-applications-with-php-and-websockets.html