UPDATE 15 Feb 2012: This post is woefully out of date. See my new PHP WebSocket Chat Application 2.0 post for a working tutorial compatible with the latest WebSocket spec as of Feb 15, 2012.
Today I’ll be doing an in-depth tutorial on how to create a simple, real-time chat application with HTML5 web sockets.
Disclaimer: Due to the relative infancy of web socket technology, this tutorial will currently only work on Google Chrome and the spec isn’t finalized yet so it may break in the future (specifically during the handshake phase).
UPDATE Nov 14, 2010: Since the writing of this post, the handshake spec has changed in such a way that browsers requiring the new spec will return the error code INVALID_STATE_ERR upon connection. I checked the PHPWebSocket page for an updated version but it looks like the developer hasn’t released one yet so instead I now recommend using Bohuco’s excellent websocket script instead.