On NetTuts.com today there's a new tutorial showing you how to implement the Pusher service that gives you real-time messaging for your application. Their backend for the project is written in PHP using Pusher's library.

Do you want to spice up your web applications by making them real-time - but don't want to create new infrastructures for the sole purpose of getting web sockets to work? In this article, we'll explore how to use and implement Pusher, an HTML5 WebSocket-powered real-time messaging service for your applications.

Pusher uses HTML5 WebSockets to handle the messaging, so you'll need a browser that supports it to follow along with the tutorial. The Pusher API provides and endpoint for authorization and the push and pull of messages. In the tutorial, they create a simple chat application that gives a "Who's Online" and a window with the latest messages. You can download the full source (Javascript and PHP) here or view a demo here.

Gonzalo Ayuso has a new post to his blog today looking at a method you can use for real-time monitoring of your PHP applications with a combination of websockets and Node.js. The trick is to handle the PHP errors and send them over to a Node.js server for processing.

The inspection of the error logs is a common way to detect errors and bugs. We also can show errors on-screen within our developement server, or we even can use great tools like firePHP to show our PHP errors and warnings inside our firebug console. That's cool, but we only can see our session errors/warnings. If we want to see another's errors we need to inspect the error log. tail -f is our friend, but we need to surf against all the warnings of all sessions to see our desired ones. Because of that I want to build a tool to monitor my PHP applications in real-time.

The service will work similar to a chat server, sending messages one at a time to the remote server via a web client (HTML5-based) and some backend PHP. He includes all the code you'll need to create the HTTP and web socket server as well as the web client (with some Javascript) and some example server-side PHP. It throws an exception and catches it to send to the waiting Node.js server. A screencast is also included showing the full process. You can get the complete code for this example in this repository on Gonzalo's github account.

Michael Feichtinger has as recent post to his blog talking about HTML5 WebSockets including an example he's created.

HTML5 WebSockets makes it possible to open a persistent connection to a server within a web-browser via javascript. Websockets works already in the latest Webkit-browsers like Safari 5 and Chrome 5. Firefox 4 Beta 1 knows the Websocket-Object but it can't open the connection.

His sample script lets you control the cursors of the other visitors of the page via some Javascript that runs a "mousemove" event on the current page. You can get the source for both the WebSocketServer and server.