How do I broadcast a message to all connected clients from within laravel?

Let's say I have an simple post route and at the end of the post route I want to notify all of my connected brain socket clients that something has been added to the database.

I've tried

Route::post('/post', function() {
// Do db stuff here
// Notify all connected brainsocket clients
BrainSocket::message('postAdded', array('message'=>'a post has been added'));
Redirect::to('/posts');
});

But my connected clients don't get the messages.

My web clients have the following

                      window.app = {};

                        app.BrainSocket = new BrainSocket(
                                        new WebSocket('ws://localhost:8080'),
                                        new BrainSocketPubSub()
                        );


                        // Brain Socket Events to listen for

                        app.BrainSocket.Event.listen('postAdded',function(msg){
                                console.log(msg);
                        });

It doesn't seem like executing BrainSocket::message anywhere outside of the laravel events.php file will push messages to my clients.

I've also tried having a generic event in my events.php file called add post which would fire when forced, ie

$event = Event::fire('addcall', array('msg'=>'help'));

Event::listen('addpost', function($client_data){
        Log::info('running add post event');
        return BrainSocket::message('callAddedToQueue', array('message'=>'Call Added'));
});

The event fires(I know because it's logged in the lararvel.log file) but the message is never broadcast out to client.s

Am I just doing it wrong? Does brainsocket not support push messages or the functionality I'm trying to achieve?

Any help would be appreciated!

[thetutlage]

Here's the deal you cannot do push notifications from the server as of today. Which means any event created directly from server only will not be pushed to the client.

You can only initiate events from one client to another Ex - you have 2 browser windows opened , in order to listen to any x event , you will have to fire the x event from the other window.

app.BrainSocket.message('generic.event',
{
     'message':'Some message from client a',
     'user_id':'client a unique id'
 }
);

app.BrainSocket.Event.listen('generic.event',function(msg){
   console.log(msg+ ' from client a as i am client b');
});

So in the above case you have generic.event fired from client a and client b has listened to it , the only benefit here is that you can attach extra data from server to this message.

If you will check their example demo , you will find the msg object contains 2 more objects having data from client and server both. Try to dig into the example.

Finally the answer is all events needs to be initiated by client not by server, waiting eagerly for new updates

[philmccarty]

This is a REALLY janky work around, but what if you did something like this:

1. create a function which checks for new database activity (not sure what you are /post-ing)
2. modify onMessage in BrainSocketEventListener, so that it ran that function
3. if, onMessage determines there is new database activity, mark that post as 'old' (as far as broadcasting is concerned)
4. then use the SplObjectStorage and send each of them a message.

The notification wouldn't necessarily be instantaneous, but it would do what you wanted. There are probably a zillion reasons this is bad (you're attaching a DB call to each message interaction), but there you go...

[tosh001]

just wondering if/when push notifications might be implemented?

[jonstuebe]

+1 for push notifications

[edyrkaj]

Any solution mix brainsocket + push notification from server ?

[jonstuebe]

@edyrkaj I think you could possibly use a combo of brainsocket and SSE. I'm going to try and experiment with it.

[edyrkaj]

Ok @jonstuebe. Please let me know about your experiment results. Thank you

[andrewrice]

@edyrkaj @jonstuebe I'm also interested in a solution! Please report back :)

[wemersonjanuario]

How about push functionality? I read that it was coming a new package supporting this but.......! is it done?

any updates aoout this ?

I have implemented brain-socket with laravel4 and able to get and send msgs in a chat room.
How can I perform user to user chat via brain-socket (e.g. create channels) and how can I insert msgs in database?

Please give an idea soon. it is very urgent for me.

Thanks for you help in advance.

[zhangtao07]

Actually I found a way to implement broadcast on server side with brain-socket. Just use another php websocket client like https://github.com/Textalk/websocket-php , then on server side,you send message in php ,and all client will get message

use WebSocket\Client;

Route::post('/post', function() {
    // Do db stuff here
    // Notify all connected brainsocket clients
    $client = new Client("ws://xxx"); 
    $message = "someone post!";
    $data = array(
        'client' => array(
            'event' => 'xx',
            'data'  => $message
        )
    );
    $client->send(json_encode($data));
    $client->close();
    Redirect::to('/posts');
});

[loffelmacher]

neat @zhangtao07 !!

[Nisthar]

@zhangtao07 Then why we need to use brain-socket. Can we use this https://github.com/Textalk/websocket-php only?

Ok. Looks like this is a client only. We need websocket server running for this to work.

[anshul32]

I also have the same question, that why should we use brain-socket? I had also use php-websocket for one of my testing application.

I have tried a lot to work with brain-socket but that was not worth for me.