Real time updates in php for a pbbg. (Php, JavaScript, and html)

I am trying to create a PBBG (persistent browser based game) like that of OGame, Space4k, and others.

My problem is with the always-updating resource collection and with the building times, as in a time is set when the building, ship, research, and etc completes building and updates the user's profile even if the user is offline. What and/or where should I learn to make this? Should it be a constantly running script in the background

Note that I wish to only use PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Mysql but will learn something new if needed.

Cron jobs or the Windows equivalent seem to be the way, but it开发者_JS百科 doesn't seem right or best to me.c

Do you have to query your db for many users properties, like "show me all users who already have a ship of the galaxy class"?

If you do not need this you could just check the build queue if someone requests the profile.

If this is not an option you could add an "finished_at" column to you database and include "WHERE finished_at>= SYSDATE()" in your query. In that case all resources (future and present) are in the same table.

Always keep in mind: what use is there to having "live" data if no one is requesting it?

My problem is with the always-updating resource collection and with the building times, as in a time is set when the building, ship, research, and etc completes building and updates the user's profile even if the user is offline

I think the best way to do this is to install message queue(But you need to be have install/compile it) like beanstalkd to do offline processing. Let's say it takes 30 seconds to build a ship. With pheanstalk client(I like pheanstalk) you first put message to the queue using:

$pheanstalk->put($data, $pri, $delay, $ttr);

You could see protocol for meaning of all arguments.

But with $delay=30. When a worker process does a reserve() it can process the message after 30 seconds.

$job = $pheanstalk->reserve();

Streaming data to user in real-time

Also you could look into XMPP over BOSH to stream the new data to all users in real-time.

• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/tutorials/x-realtimeXMPPtut/index.html
• http://abhinavsingh.com/blog/2010/08/php-code-setup-and-demo-of-jaxl-boshchat-application/