On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new post from Lukas White about using PHP and web sockets to create a "live score" widget to include in your site.

The introduction of web sockets makes it possible for web applications to handle near real-time data without resorting to "hacks" such as long-polling. One example of an application requiring up-to-the-minute data is sports scores. Even now, many websites which display this information use Flash applications, since Actionscript provides the facility to communicate over socket-based connections. However, web sockets allow us to replicate this functionality using only HTML and Javascript. That's what we're going to build in this tutorial, along with a lightweight "server" in PHP.

His example uses the Ratchet PHP library to provide the WebSockets functionality to the frontend script polling for the latest data. He helps you get the library installed and set up a simple directory structure for the example. He includes sample scripts for both the data provider (for the scores) and the WebSocket provider. He talks about maintaining the state of the data and shows how to pull out random data from a set of fixtures (pre-defined data) to send back to the frontend. The Javascript for the frontend script is also included.