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[nycphp-talk] PHP AND AOL Instant Messenger

Daniel Convissor danielc at analysisandsolutions.com
Sat Oct 2 12:13:52 EDT 2004


Joseph:

On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 09:45:51AM -0400, Joseph Crawford wrote:
> 
> so the only way to do something like this is to communicate to a
> server process? i mean i cant have someone go to the site, login and
> have the socket remain open such as this.
> 
> user goes to the site, logs in, that page doesnt change once they
> login, when they click a user in thier userlist it opens a new window
> via javascript that will allow them to send the message in some way.

If you're looking to do this so a user can be on a web browser looking at 
a page on a web host, it seems you're misunderstanding how the HTTP 
protocol works.

A web browser opens an HTTP request to a web server, asking it to return a 
specific page.  If the page in question is a script (such as PHP or Perl), 
the server tells the appropriate interpreter to run the script and 
generate the HTML.  The HTML is then passed to your web browser.  The 
transaction is finished and the connection closed.  Your browser then 
renders the HTML.

So, once your page request is fulfilled, there is no more connection 
between you and the server.  Therefore there is no way to maintain an 
interactive process like you want.

The only way to get this to work is with another protocol.  Java or 
Flash, among other things, can be used to do that.

--Dan

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