I’m working on a project where I’m generating stats for a leaderboard and several other locations. My goal with this is to have it as real-time as possible, so to that end I have implemented a RabbitMQ server for message queueing.
On the frontend, I have a nodejs setup, to feed the information out to the clients who are watching it. On that same server, I have a PHP process to listen to the queue and log the messages to a database for history. What I’m trying to work out now is how to communicate between the nodejs system and that PHP process without hitting the database.
Your RabbitMQ message queue already is an excellent means of communication. Just use that and make both the PHP process and Node.js subscribe to it and/or communicate through it as necessary.
RabbitMQ.com has a list of tutorials, libraries, and docs for PHP. Rabbit.js seems to be a good bet for Node.js.