Question

I need to develop HTTP push using php, it sends back a message to the browser every 20 seconds.. that i need to display on the server

Is there any way of implementing http push in php with out using any sockets or library?

Answer 1

Sure: don’t let your PHP script terminate for as long as you want the connection to remain open. Since you are generating output every 20 sec, the connection is much less likely to timeout.

There are many ways to achieve this including blocking (e.g. sleep() below) or busy waiting, but the simplest solution would be:

while( true ){
    generate_output();
    sleep(20);
}

You may need to handle unexpected connection termination on the client-side, but this is the jist of it. Check your system configuration to see how many open connections you can handle. (In Apache, see MaxClients)

As for the client-side, see this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/7953033/329062