Real time notifications on shared hosting (PHP, MySQL, Yii)

Question

I'm currently developing a website that requires a push notification style system like Facebook notifications. I would like the user to be notified when an event occurs such as "X added you as a friend"...

I've been looking into my options however they seem to be extremely limited as the website will be hosted on a shared hosting platform therefore I have limited access etc.

1) Looking at long polling comet style - as I can't run Python on the server, my only option here is PHP for the server script however due to thread consumption this probably isn't a very scalable option.

2) WebSockets - these look great but with browser support limited it doesn't seem plausible just yet..

So - has anyone accomplished this on a shared hosting platform? I'd rather not have to use a service like Pusher.

Many thanks!! :)

PS - I'm using Yii framework - any solutions with that in mind would be even better

Answer 1

use Ratchet , it is a WebSocket for PHP.

Ratchet is a loosely coupled PHP library providing developers with tools to create real time, bi-directional applications between clients and servers over WebSockets. This is not your Grandfather's Internet.

here is a helloworld example.

Answer 2

Use html5 SSE (Server sent dom events) for chrome, firefox, opera and ie10

for older versions of IE use iframe loading as a fallback.

all those techniques should work well with any kind of shared hosting since they do not require any kind of server side setup.

Answer 3

https://stackoverflow.com/a/1086448/1063333 :

A common method of doing such notifications is to poll a script on the server (using ajax) on a given interval (perhaps every few seconds), to check if something has happened