mikeaag

Hi Nevi-me

I've come across Socket.io before, and played around with pusher as well. And if i remember correctly, Laravel has built in helpers for sending websocket messages.

My main issue is actually running the node.js application, as its something i've not done before. That was another reason for not using websockets. Wanted to remove as many barriers that might slow us down or stop us from launching, so we stuck with what we knew.

I'm sure i'll update this at some point to use websockets though, gotta learn how to deploy node.js sites at some point :D

The benefit of using websockets is that each user's browser doesnt need to constantly be requesting the number of users from our server. If the number of users on the site hasnt changed, then with AJAX polling, its a wasted request. But with websockets there is no waste, the client gets pushed the updates when they happen from the server.

Having said all that, with the number of requests that we're getting at the moment, i dont think it makes much of a difference. Though im guessing if we got a lot more traffic, then websockets would probably reduce our server load.

Hey shujito, It's built with PHP using Laravel. And the Database is MariaDB.

Let me know if theres anything else you'd like to know

Hey subie,

I'm one of the creators of Real Time Users.

Only 1 AJAX call get sent to 'track' you on the site for each page load. The AJAX calls you're seeing are asking the server for the latest number of users on the site so that we can update the value displayed.

This isnt the most efficient way of doing this, as if the site has a low number of users, the count will return the same number most of the time. A better way would be to use websockets, however i only have limited knowledge of using websockets so we decided it was best to just stick to the tech we knew (Especially as we built it in a weekend).

If people start using this more, we might update it to use websockets though.

Hope that answers your questions. Let me know if theres anything else you'd like to know.

Thanks for the notes, will definitely take them on board. Auto-submit is probably going to be the first feature that gets added. I currently have a separate bookmarklet for it, but it's much easier if it's just part of the generated bookmarklet.

Hey, thanks for the comment.

I find it crazy that you created that 9 years ago!

FormFiller doesn't currently support auto filling the form with data, but it's definitely something i've considered for the future. I've saved that post and will give it another read when I get around to adding that functionality in.

Cheers, Mike

They are indeed similar, but work a little differently. One of the main requirements I had when making FormFiller was it needed to be cross browser. The reason for this is that at work I have to use Firefox, and our testers prefer IE, but at home I use chrome. I wanted to create something which I could use on any browser, so unfortunately browser extensions were out of the question :(

Lazarus does look interesting though.