Got this idea from a Meetup I go to. Every meeting they have a few giveaways and some guys made PickMe (http://pickme.io). Basically it allows people to simply visit a link and they get added to the system of people wanting to get picked. Then someone with the admin window up clicks a pick button and one person gets a greeen screen and everyone else gets a red screen. I had been wanting to create something with WebSockets for awhile so I figured this would be a fun project to reproduce their functionaility.

This package is built using Ratchet (http://socketo.me/) on the backend for the Websocket server and right now just vanilla js on the frontend. I also use http://avatars.adorable.io/ to generate the random avatars it assigns to each person.

I have a working example running at http://picker.eboodevelopment.com/ to access the admin view just go to http://picker.eboodevelopment.com/#admin

To get it running first you need to get all dependencies so run composer install. Then you can simply go to the project directory and run

php app/server.php

By default the websocket server will run on port 8282, if you already have something running on that port you can update it in app/server.php edit this line:

...
new HttpServer(
        new WsServer(
            new Message()
        )
    ),
    8282 //<-EDIT THIS
);
...

and on web/index.hml update this line:

...
var conn = new WebSocket('ws://localhost:8282'); //<-EDIT THIS LINE
var body = $('body');
...

You should then be able to open up a browser and open up the /web/index.html and it should work.

To access the system as an admin simply add #admin to the end of the url. Example: http:/localhost/web/index.html#admin