phpp2p

Is it possible to have a peer to peer communication using nothing but PHP

Is it possible to implement a p2p using just PHP? Without Flash or Java and obviously without installing some sort of agent/client on one's computer.

so even though it might not be "true" p2p, but it'd use server to establish connection of some sort, but rest of communication must be done using p2p

i apologize for little miscommunication, by "php" i meant not a php binary, but a php script that hosted on web server remote from both peers, so each peer have nothing but a browser.

Solution

  • No.

    You could write a P2P client / server in PHP — but it would have to be installed on the participating computers.

    You can't have PHP running on a webserver cause two other computers to communicate with each other without having P2P software installed.

    You can't even use JavaScript to help — the same origin policy would prevent it.

    JavaScript running a browser could use a PHP based server as a middleman so that two clients could communicate — but you aren't going to achieve P2P.

    Since 2009 (when this answer was originally written), the WebRTC protocol was written and achieved widespread support among browsers.

    This allows you to perform peer-to-peer between web browsers but you need to write the code in JavaScript (WebAssembly might also be an option and one that would let you write PHP.)

    You also need a bunch of non-peer server code to support WebRTC (e.g. for allow peer discovery and proxy data around firewalls) which you could write in PHP.