Notifications and Refresh without Pusher, etc.

Dominion I've been thinking about this..
I hate to keep referring to wordpress.. but they have a wp-cron.php file that when run, causes it to "update" - so to speak. By default, every action you do on a wordpress site causes wp-cron.php to run.
This is really, really inefficient but also moderately effective and as you might mention - very out of box supported.
The problem is, php programs have no sense of time. It is a server-side renderer that generates html pages. This is worsened by the fact that flarum doesn't even refresh when you go from page to page (this is why notifications don't show up until you refresh the page - I noticed this for much longer with noscript).

Because of that, it's impossible for flarum to mimick what a pusher service provides. Any attempt will have to be a hack (like wp-cron.php) and be hard-coded to pull content on certain clicks. Should it do it on every page scroll? Clicking on discussions? Doing nothing would result in nothing ever showing up as a notification and is almost guaranteed to result in slower page loads (since it's doing more) and potential scaling issues (flarum-cron.php being run every half second on a busy site?) something has to tell flarum that something has changed, please run code to update it.

Both toby and franz are devs that know magnitudes more then me about php coding, so maybe they have some idea of circumventing wordpress's (and piwiks) best implementation of dealing with the php and time issue.

But as it stands, I'm sorry to say this, but if you're on a shared hoster, or simply don't want to know how to start and configure services outside of a webserver, you're going to be stuck. There are solutions, but I wouldn't call them optimal :\, or even if they would work as a forum notifier..

I'm aware that pusher is planning to be rewritten, but it looks like it's primarily focused on other components. I'm hoping it can be slightly modified to permit designating a ip address and port @Toby. If they both follow the same protocol, then it should be a drop in replacement (pusher.com -> slanger, etc) and I can get to testing how well it works, bugs, etc.

After having read most of this thread I'd like to clarify some technicalities.

It's very nice to talk about pusher and slanger without knowing what they facilitate. To keep it simple (which it is), both use the same piece of javascript. So switching between those server endpoints is as easy as changing the configuration of listenening and serving.

Websockets are continuous connections between machines. They can be used to send over data whenever you like. Normal behaviour is that any visitor on a website is registered on some channels and php sends data to these visitors whenever necessary. There are a lot of benefits to using websockets, to mention some:

• truly knowing whether someone is online (green circles talked about around avatars are exact)
• no continuous requests to the server asking questions (ajax)
• direct notifications, not every x minutes, about updates on threads

To give you some dimensions of use, some of you might know battlelog by EA; it uses pusher almost solely. At work I also implemented websockets (at first slanger, proving less stable we moved to pusher) which notifies accounts immediately about any finished tasks once done, shows us a list of all online accounts in real-time and shows us a dashboard of open tickets.. The application is endless using websockets.

I'm a big fan of websockets.

Ps please be aware that pusher is more stable, it also caps maximum payload data. So switching requires you to understand the max length of the data you're sending.

luceos I think the issue is not the usability of Websockets (they're great!), but the fact that pusher is a paid app. And on top of that, the user has to embed a 64KB js file as well? That's not right.

And to put icing on the cake, the free version allows for only 20 connections?

I'd personally rather just use nodejs and the ws module here. (And use the normal html 5 websocket connection api that's like 2 lines of code) Much, much better.

ashconnor So I figured I'd try and install it.
It was a bit of a PITA to get it running... but my experience is:

• Ensure your go (golang) version is greater then 1.1
  • If not, remove it and make sure to remove all existing files related to it
    • Download golang and it's GOPATH variable is exported correctly (wherever go is installed to) - I extracted mine to /usr/local/go
    • Make sure the go command works
• Follow this guide and ensure you have a file named config.json with at least the sample config in your current directory when you run the ipe command

I also added this to /etc/bash.bashrc to ensure my shell knew where everything was since it wasn't setup automatically for some reason (probably because I had to manually install golang) - you may or may not need to do this.

# Path
PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin
## Exports

# Golang variable
export GOPATH=/usr/local/go/

Hopefully that helps.. a lot of the errors I got weren't especially clear

I should note that IPE apparently permits multiple application id's in one config... that could be very useful for splitting up multiple pusher (flarum) installs. Unfortunately, there's not much documentation for the config... but my guess is it's my limited understanding of pusher that's hindering me as to what each of the config options do.

I think telepat http://telepat.io can be installed locally and used instead of pusher.