Revath S Kumar

When you want to communicate between two processes, one of the popular approch is sockets. So when I need a notification system I thought of writing as a seperate service and pass data from my main web application to this notifier via a UDP socket.

So I wrote a nodejs app for the UDP server to accept data from my client (webapp) and notifiy the other clients using websockets.

To write a server which accepts UDP connections you can use dgram module in nodejs.

var dgram = require('dgram');
var udpPort = process.env.UDPPORT || 3000;

var server = dgram.createSocket('udp4');
server.bind(udpPort);

server.on('listening', function(){
  console.log('Server started at ', udpPort);
});

server.on('message', function(msg, info){
  var message = msg.toString(); // need to convert to string 
  // since message is received as buffer 
  // receive the message and do task
});

server.on('error', function(){
  // handle error
});

You can bind to lisening event to task after the server is up and for startup message. To recieve message from the clients you need to bind message event.

Now if you are using PHP to send data to UDP port then

<?php
$socket = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, SOL_UDP);
if(!socket_connect($socket, 'localhost', '3000')) {
    echo "socket connection error";
    return;
}

$msg = "Sample message from PHP";
$bytes = socket_write($socket, $msg_json);

?>