Socket Programming With PHP
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If you've been working with PHP for a while, you're probably used to thinking about it only in the context of a Web page or a Web server. While this is not unusual - PHP is, after all, a scripting language that's most commonly used to dynamically generate Web pages - it can stifle your creativity; as you'll see in this article, there's a lot more you can do with PHP than just connect to a database, retrieve records and insert them into an HTML template.
One of PHP's better-guarded secrets - and one that I discovered quite by accident - is a very comprehensive set of network programming functions. Steadily evolving over the last few releases, this socket programming API now supports almost everything you would need for socket-based client-server communication over TCP/IP, and can be rapidly deployed to build simple client-server applications in PHP.
Over the course of this article, I'll be taking a close look at the more important functions in this API, using code listings and explanations to put them in context. Along the way, I'll also build some simple client-server applications, thereby illustrating PHP's effectiveness as a rapid development and deployment tool for network-based applications through practical, real-life examples (well, some of them, at any rate).
It should be noted at the outset itself that this is an introductory article, primarily meant for Web developers interested in expanding their PHP knowledge into the somewhat-arcane area of network programming. I won't be getting into anything too complicated - for truly sophisticated client-server programming, you're probably better off with C++ or Java anyway - preferring instead to focus on the practical applications of PHP's socket functions. As is traditional with these articles, I'll also keep the technical jargon to a minimum, avoiding mention of tongue-twisting acronyms and hard-to-pronounce buzzwords.
In return for all this largesse, I expect you to laugh at the appropriate places, and say nice things about me to your friends. Do we have a deal?{mospagebreak title=Going Backwards} For those of you new to the topic, a "socket" provides a way for clients and servers to communicate in a networked environment. It creates an end-to-end communication channel, allowing a client to send requests to a server and a server to receive these requests and respond to them. A common example here is that of a Web server; the server opens a socket (usually on port 80), and clients (Web browsers) communicate with it through this socket, requesting specific HTML pages for processing and display.
PHP comes with a fairly comprehensive set of functions to create and manipulate socket communications; however, this capability is not enabled by default. Consequently, you may need to recompile your PHP binary with the "--enable-sockets" parameter to activate socket support. Windows users get a pre-built binary with their distribution.
Let's start with a simple example - a TCP server that accepts a string as input, reverses it and returns it to the client. Here's the code:
<?
// set some variables
$host = "192.168.1.99";
$port = 1234;
// don't timeout!
set_time_limit(0);
// create socket
$socket = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0) or die("Could not create
socket\n");
// bind socket to port
$result = socket_bind($socket, $host, $port) or die("Could not bind to
socket\n");
// start listening for connections
$result = socket_listen($socket, 3) or die("Could not set up socket
listener\n");
// accept incoming connections
// spawn another socket to handle communication
$spawn = socket_accept($socket) or die("Could not accept incoming
connection\n");
// read client input
$input = socket_read($spawn, 1024) or die("Could not read input\n");
// clean up input string
$input = trim($input);
// reverse client input and send back
$output = strrev($input) . "\n";
socket_write($spawn, $output, strlen ($output)) or die("Could not write
output\n");
// close sockets
socket_close($spawn);
socket_close($socket);
?>
This is somewhat involved, so an explanation is in
order:
1. The first step here is to set up a couple of variables to hold information on the IP address and port on which the socket server will run. You can set up your server to use any port in the numeric range 1-65535, so long as that port is not already in use.
<?
// set some variables
$host = "192.168.1.99";
$port = 1234;
?>
2. Since this is a server, it's also a good idea to use the
set_time_limit() function to ensure that PHP doesn't time out and die() while waiting for incoming client connections.
<?
// don't timeout!
set_time_limit(0);
?>
3. With the preliminaries out of the way, it's time to create
a socket with the socket_create() function - this function returns a socket handle that must be used in all subsequent function calls.
<?
// create socket
$socket = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0) or die("Could not create
socket\n");
?>
In case you're wondering what this is all about, don't worry
too much about it. The AF_INET parameter specifies the domain, while the SOCK_STREAM parameter tells the function what type of socket to create (in this case, TCP).
If you wanted to create a UDP socket, you could use the following line of code instead:
<?
// create socket
$socket = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, 0) or die("Could not create
socket\n");
?>
4. Once a socket handle has been created, the next step is to
attach, or "bind", it to the specified address and port. This is accomplished via the socket_bind() function.
<?
// bind socket to port
$result = socket_bind($socket, $host, $port) or die("Could not bind to
socket\n");
?>
5. With the socket created and bound to a port, it's time to
start listening for incoming connections. PHP allows you to set the socket up as a listener via its socket_listen() function, which also allows you to specify the number of queued connections to allow as a second parameter (3, in this example).
<?
// start listening for connections
$result = socket_listen($socket, 3) or die("Could not set up socket
listener\n");
?>
6. At this point, your server is basically doing nothing,
waiting for incoming client connections. Once a client connection is received, the socket_accept() function springs into action, accepting the connection request and spawning another child socket to handle messaging between the client and the server.
<?
// accept incoming connections
// spawn another socket to handle communication
$spawn = socket_accept($socket) or die("Could not accept incoming
connection\n");
?>
This child socket will now be used for all subsequent
communication between the client and server.
7. With a connection established, the server now waits for the client to send it some input - this input is read via the socket_read() function, and assigned to the PHP variable $input.
<?
// read client input
$input = socket_read($spawn, 1024) or die("Could not read input\n");
?>
The second parameter to socket_read() specifies the number of
bytes of input to read - you can use this to limit the size of the data stream read from the client.
Note that the socket_read() function continues to read data from the client until it encounters a carriage return (\n), a tab (\t) or a \0 character. This character as treated as the end-of-input character, and triggers the next line of the PHP script.
8. The server now must now process the data sent by the client - in this example, this processing merely involves reversing the input string and sending it back to the client. This is accomplished via the socket_write() function, which makes it possible to send a data stream back to the client via the communication socket.
<?
// reverse client input and send back
$output = strrev($input) . "\n";
socket_write($spawn, $output, strlen ($output)) or die("Could not write
output\n");
?>
The socket_write() function needs three parameters: a
reference to the socket, the string to be written to it, and the number of bytes to be written.
9. Once the output has been sent back to the client, both generated sockets are terminated via the socket_close() function.
<?
// close sockets
socket_close($spawn);
socket_close($socket);
?>
And that's it - socket creation, in nine easy
steps!
Next: Putting It All Together >>
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