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Comment by joering2 | Hacker News Reader

No later than yesterday I spent couple hours researching Websocket servers to no avail. I want to run it on Apache/Windows with PHP (there is some python implementation, but I wish it would be as simple as mod_websocked and opening concurrent port). Unfortunately solutions like Heroku are tremendously expensive in my opinion, if you want to build something that will have 1,000 websocket connections at the same time. Could not find anything reliable. This and fact IE/Opera do not have websocket implemented, makes me come back to good old Flash technology - building a simple socket module that will trigger Javascript functions inside a webpage.

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Opera does support Websocket - http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/presto27/websocket/

As will IE10 - http://html5labs.interoperabilitybridges.com/prototypes/webs...

Full matrix at http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets

I stand corrected in regards to Opera. I have 9.8 (which I downloaded not so long ago) which does not support Websocket.

One of the tradeoffs of Heroku's great hosting solutions is that they don't support WebSockets.

If you're worried about compatibility, check out PubNub or Pusher.

Pusher definitely too expensive for a project with no revenue model behind.

You could fallback to a Flash implementation of WebSocket, and use the native browser implementation when available: https://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js

Thanks for the link (+1). First glance, this requires ruby. My installation is WAMP. I can open any ports and have root to that Windows machine, but I think Ruby would take me too much time to learn right now.

This and fact IE/Opera do not have websocket implemented, makes me come back to good old Flash technology

See socket.io for something even better.

I did. My understanding is that socket.io requires Websocket server, which I am unable to build at this moment. I spent some time researching into phpWebsocket until it turned out that the project has not been updated for about 2 yars now.

Sorry I didn't read your comment properly. If nothing else works, maybe you can develop with a Linux VM with a platform that already has a good websocket server (say, node.js), and host on any VPS. Good luck.

So you want to use new software like WebSockets without ... using new software like WebSockets? There's no free lunch here, new transport architectures require new application architectures. If you aren't able to modify your backend then you can't do WebSockets.

Certainly Socket.io is a very simple (surprisingly so, even) implementation of a JSON-based event architecture on top of WebSockets, with integrated fallbacks to other transports on older browsers. But it requires node.js on the server side (though to be fair: it's protocol is very simple and could be reimplemented without too much trouble if you only wanted the client-side fallback stuff).

Apache and PHP were not made with Websockets in mind - they're stateless, whereas Websockets messaging typically requires stateful persistent connections. This is a big reason a lot of developers are using these new web architectures (Node, EventMachine, TwistedMatrix etc), or migrating back to JVM based systems.

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