What would be a good way to make a online card game with chat-function in PHP?
A colleague mentioned Ajax Push Engine (APE) but APE's latest release is from 2009. Orbited on the other hand doesn't seem to work with PHP.
Is there a viable alternative to those two that works with PHP?
I would just give up. Making a card game with PHP is far too much hard since PHP is not really meant for this kind of things. Anyway if you really want to give it a try, just use PHP, MYSQL (PDO for example) and AJAX (with jQuery, which i personally love). Also most of the chats written in PHP are made up with AJAX and most of them use jQuery as well.
I've recently seen also an html5 stuff for chats: http://weevilgenius.net/2010/10/html-5-websocket-chat-demo/ . But i seriously would never go with such a new technology for a business site.