Develop Reference

How can I retrieve a list of websocket connections?

I'm working on a chatbot project where we open a websocket connection to communicate the chat messages.
Sometimes we get duplicate messages back and forth. I suspect that a second client is booted. I want to modify the boot() function so that it checks for existing websocket connections (and either cancel booting or close all other connections first).
Is there a way to get this from a vanilla javascript perspective? or do I maybe need to do something from the backend?

I tried to figure it out by looking at the code but without even a line number on which the error appears, it's pretty hard, anyways.
I suppose this is the problem here:
conn.send('USER_CONNECTED:' + conn.id); // send the connect message to ONE user
conn.broadcast('USER_DISCONNECTED:' + conn.id); // send the disconnect to ALL users
So it seems that you're simply missing a broadcast call when a user connects.

How to watch user requests from server?

I am developing a website using J2EE(JSP,struct2) and Apache Container. My website will be some kind of scial media webiste like facebook.
All the thing I like to do is to change the user login status in database to active after user login and change it again after user logouts. Those active user list has to be shown to other users as well.
All I am thinking is to change user active status as soon as user login to the website and will use ajax for up-to-date active user list. The thing I have trouble is that I want the server to check if the user is still active and still using the website every 5 seconds or whatever.
To do so, all I am thinking is to watch the user from server if it is still sending the requests to the server. How can I watch like that?? Where can I read the tutorials to write such cde.

You will need 2 parts to solve your requirements.
JavaScript on client
Ajax receiver on server
Client:
On the client side can you use a idle handler which sends a request after some idle time on the user side.
Choose one of this solution
https://www.startpage.com/do/asearch?cat=&query=inactivity+user+javascript
Server:
On the server side just receive the Ajax request and write it to a DB. Afterwards you can do whatever ever you need with this record

Two suggestions:
First: Using something like socket.io instead of AJAX in order to make it more
lightweight on the server side.
Second: Consider delegating the inactivity detection and announcement to the client.

Push a notification to another user

This question isn't a code-level issue but merely a functionality question / brainstorm.
Within my PHP script I want to send a notification to another user in real time, there's 1 way I've thought of to do this, if you know any better ones be sure to leave them in the comments!
My idea for this functionality is to insert into a databse table with the user's id and the message, then on the user's end constantly loop a select request looking for notifications corresponding to their id within $_SESSION, if it's found a message then delete it from the table and display it to the user.
This seems like it could "strain" my database and I'm wondering if there's a cleaner way to do this, it would also be much appreciated if somebody could post a javascript loop with a 3 second delay and an ajax post to a php file within it,
Thanks all,
James

The cleaner way to do this would be with websockets. Polling, long polling, and streaming are going to have exactly the problem you thought you were going to have.
The message recipient needs to be listening via broadcast also through websockets. The server will notify all websockets listening for that particular event.
You don't want to block with database read and writes. Just take the action from one user and send it to all the other websockets listening for that event (the other user's client side instances)
For event history you would consider persisting to a database with a message queue.

With a properly indexed, well-structured table, it won't be a strain to the db at all. Of course, this assumes your interval is reasonable (3 seconds you mentioned is great). That's how all real-time session-checking websites work. Those that need more than that, such as chat systems, basically anything that passes data more frequently and/or in larger packets, they use websockets.

Use Websockets or Server-Sent-Events
just an idea:
User-1 send message to the Server {"message" : "hello", "target" : "User-2"}
Server checks the message and redirect it to the target User
User-2 listening for events from Websocket or Server-Sent-Events

On site notification system

I was tasked to build a calendar and agenda library (I'm working on the CodeIgniter framework), that shows a calendar and the user has the possibility to set events on that calendar.
These events will have a notification system both email, and when the user is browsing the site, a popup.
My issue is how to approach the notification part when the user is on the site. The email is something that I already decided would be done trough a cronjob that will run every x minutes and check if there is any need to send a notification email.
The on site notification is something else.
How would I approach this? I just can't make a ajax request to the server every x seconds, since that would put an unnaceptable load on the system. (Of course when the user is eventually notified, a request must be made, to set the user as "remined" on the database).
I can't just depend on the user's date time, since he could be anywhere in the world and the time would be different.
How can I check that the user must be notified of a event, avoiding making repeated requests to the server? Would appreciate any input.

I could see using setTimeout to do this. Say a user visits your page $minutesTilDue minutes prior the reminder being due. Assuming jQuery/PHP:
$(function(){
setTimeout(function(){
showEventReminder(<?php json_encode($event) ?>);
}, <?php echo $minutesTilDue ?> * 60 * 1000);
});
Nothing too fancy, but depending on your requirements...
Cheers

Easily scalable notification systems use websockets, which today reach the majority of the users, even on mobile devices. Unfortunately, you'll need a websocket-enabled server - node, glassfish, whatever - this can't be done with standard PHP deployments (mod_php or fcgi). Server events (so called server push) are sent when they are generated, so once you have your websocket client-server pair, sending a reminder is just like sending an email.
Actually things are more complicated because most likely users won't be online at the exact time the reminder should pop up. I suggest a notification icon which is refreshed each time the user hits a page. This way your calendar system (suppose a cronjob) will simply update a flag for the user row in the DB, and when you build the page, you already know if there reminders (let's say, in the next 60 minutes) or not, and choose the icon accordingly. At this point, you have two choices:
sending the reminders to the client along with each and every request (it could be a waste of bandwidth, but I don't thing a JSON-encoded list of events is so heavyweight)
Download the reminders asynchronously on demand, ie only when the user hits the notification icon
This scenario lets you reuse the PHP environment and code, and doesn't require another host for the websocket server. I think this is the best solution, even if this doesn't fulfill your requirement of a truly popup reminder triggered by the server at the right time. BTW, if you send events with every request, your javascript can pop up when needed - you can use setTimeout() for this.

Server polling intervals for a javascript chat client

I'm building a basic little AJAX shoutbox/chat for my website, but I'm not sure exactly how to implement the server polling.
Here's the basic program flow I'm thinking of:
User comes to page and is shown the last 10 messages
To get messages sent by others, the client javascript would request a URL with a timestamp parameter (set to the value of the last message the client received)
The server returns all messages (up to a max of 10) since that timestamp.
The only issue is how often to poll the server. Obviously it should poll each time a new message is added, but when you're just reading others' messages it needs to automatically update.
Should it be a set time limit? eg: every 10 seconds. Or, should it vary depending on usage? eg: Check after 5 seconds. If there's no messages, don't check for another 10 seconds. If there's still no new messages, check in 15 seconds, then 20, up to maybe once every 30 seconds max. Each time there's a new message detected reset your timer back down to 5 seconds and start again.
I'm just concerned about putting unnecessary stress on the server, considering that we could have hundreds of users concurrently online.
...or have I got the whole thing wrong? Is there a better way to implement a basic javascript chat?

You might want to look into what are known as Comet programming techniques to stream information down to your users, rather than having the client poll the server. This is actually a family of techniques, some of which may work better than others depending on the circumstances, such as what kind of server you're using and what kind of client compatibility you need.
If your server can handle a large number of open connections at a time (as in, it does not use an entire thread or process per connection, such as nginx or an erlang based server), you may wish to use a long polling technique, where as soon one message is received, the client immediately requests another message. If there are no messages available, the server simply keeps the connection open, possibly sending occasionally dummy data as a keepalive, until a message becomes available.

Comet, described by Brian is a nice technique, but requires session support on the server, which is probably more advanced than you care to implement for a simple chat box.
The best way to implement polling intervals is to imagine you having a chat window which you can minimize to do other stuff, or open to see if you have new messages. When you are in the middle of a conversation, you'll switch to it (poll) frequently. If you don't get any messages for a while, you will start looking rarer and rarer until you only check it occasionally.
Assuming you don't need to do real-time typing, you can probably poll every 3 seconds or so when at peak activity, and if nothing shows up for 5-10 polls, start to crank the interval up (perhaps doubling it every time) until it hits 30-60 seconds. Getting a message back should reset the poll interval back to a few seconds, while sending a message should poll instantly, but probably doesn't need to effect the frequency of polling otherwise.

Honestly, if you are implementing a “basic little AJAX shoutbox/chat”, things like Jabber, Comet etc are overkill for you. These things will require you to run additional
servers/proxies to take the load of the app server and db.
When you think about stuff like presence management (“Joe is typing...”), then things get overly complex for your app (considering “chat” is not your prime focus).
Think about adding widgets from providers like Meebo and Userplane. Once you scale think about the Jabber and the like…

You should check to see if the other user is typing every 5 seconds or so, if the other user is typing, then you can check every 1 second to see if the user has sent a new message. Really though, you should be able to check every 1 second to see if other user is typing and if they are then every .25-.5 second check to see if new message has been sent. With broadband being so generally accepted on the inet, shouldn't be a problem. Go with the longer poll timeout for a dial-up access.

This is a very hard question, keep abuse in mind. Malicious users will hit you as often as possible, with the earliest timestamp faked so as to cause stress on your DB server. Be sure to validate that timestamp, or ignore it, because shouldnt everyone be in the same time anyway?
You can send the polling interval to the user as a function of the other user's response time. That's the best kind of dynamic I think.

http://jabbify.com/home/comet_service
This is a free comet based chat service by the guys who did the jmvc framework. Haven't tried it yet, but looks promising.

The professional way of doing this is with a WebSocket javascript connection. You can use a free service like https://socketsbay.com/ for example, and connect using
// Create WebSocket connection.
const socket = new WebSocket('wss://socketsbay.com/wss/v2/[ChannelId]/[ApiKey]/');
// Connection opened
socket.addEventListener('open', function (event) {
socket.send('Hello Server!');
});
// Listen for messages
socket.addEventListener('message', function (event) {
console.log('Message from server ', event.data);
});
You can forget about server pooling time because it will be realtime.