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Robert Walker
16,514 PointsUsing Node.js on a website built using PHP to get current online users
I have been learning about Node here on Treehouse but have fiddled around with it building a chat sometime ago using express and socket io and it all seems easy enough but with watching the course here on Treehouse I was thinking about a project im currently building in PHP and a current issue with how best to get current online users.
It got me thinking can I not use Node for this in some way?
In PHP I would need to either count sessions which is bad because if someone closes the browsers the session still shows for a while or I can store activity time every page hit and then check if activity time is less than 5 minutes ago but it all requires a lot of calls and checks and in the end is not always going to be that accurate.
So with node being able to have a persistent connection it seems ideal to check my online user status, problem is im not really sure how this would work, what I would require in terms of server and so on.
Does anyone know how I might go about this?