Sergey Zhuk has a new post to his site showing how you can use ReactPHP's socket component to build a simple chat service as a server runing on a remote port.

In this article, we are going to build a simple chat server based on ReactPHP Socket Component. With this component, we can build simple async, streaming plaintext TCP/IP or a secure TLS socket server.

There are client and server sockets. The server is bound to a specific port number and just waits listening on this port. The client knows the host of the server and the port on which the server is listening. When the connection between server and client is established, the data exchange begins.

He then gets into the code required to make the server and add in some additional functionality. He starts by creating the server to listen for incoming connections and has it write back a simple message to prove it's working correctly. He then moves on to the code required for sending and receiving data. This initial version just echoes back what the user submits. He takes this an expands it out to start on the intiial steps of the chat system - creating the connection pool for multiple clients, storing usernames of those connected and using that information when transmitting a message to all clients connected.