The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted from Christopher Pitt (known for his "interesting" uses of PHP) covering the combination of ReactJS and PHP in game development. He wants to answer the question of how compatible they are and provide an example to help illustrate.

I started thinking about this the moment I decided to try and build a game using PHP and ReactJS. The trouble is that I knew nothing about the dynamics of multiplayer games, or how to think about and implement player-based economies.

I wasn’t even sure that I knew enough about ReactJS to justify using it. [...] I once watched a talk, by dead_lugosi, where she described building a medieval game in PHP. Margaret inspired me, and that talk was one of the things that lead to me writing a book about JS game development. I became determined to write about my experience. Perhaps others could learn from my mistakes in this case, too.

He hops right in to the code from there, starting with the setup of the backend functionality making use of Aerys for the HTTP/WebSocket handling. He creates a few basic routes then moves on to the frontend using Laravel Mix to pull in the dependencies he needs and perform the steps needed to build things out. He then goes through the process of creating the application frontend and connecting the WebSocket requests to a "GameSocket" endpoint. He finishes up the post with updates the Javascript to add in functionality to send a message to all users connected to the WebSocket.