In our sales events platform, Auctibles, sellers have the exciting opportunity to create various events. These range from a sale event at a fixed price to live auctions, where buyers bid the price up, providing a dynamic and engaging experience.
The Technology
We use the Laravel framework in the context of the TALL stack: Tailwind, Alpine.js, Laravel, and Livewire.
Why Emulation?
For a demo environment, it's crucial that we accurately emulate buyers' activity for a seller. This includes sending buy orders and chat messages. The purpose of the emulation is to allow the seller to get a feeling of how the event with multiple buyers will be observed from the event control screens. This includes changing the quantities of items still available, dynamic price changes, and chat messages from buyers.
Ordinary Buyers
The buy screen is a Livewire component. Clicking the BUY button sends a broadcast event: LiveBuy,
LiveBid
,...
Similarly, buyers send chat messages via a broadcast event ChatMessage.
Bots for Emulation
We emulate buyers' activity via a bot. The bot is a ReactPHP server that periodically sends the same broadcast events that ordinary buyers send.
The server receives a set_timer
GET call at the event's start and a stop_timer
GET call at its end.
$loop = Factory::create();
$server = new Server(function (ServerRequestInterface $request) use($loop) {
$path = $request->getUri()->getPath();
$method = $request->getMethod();
if ($path == '/set_timer' && $method === 'GET') {
$params = $request->getQueryParams();
$event_id = $params['event_id'] ?? null;
// start emulation
return Response::plaintext('timer set')->withStatus(Response::STATUS_OK);
} else if ($path == '/stop_timer' && $method === 'GET') {
$params = $request->getQueryParams();
$event_id = $params['event_id'] ?? null;
// stop emulation
return Response::plaintext('timer stopped')->withStatus(Response::STATUS_OK);
}
});
$socket = new SocketServer('0.0.0.0:' . config('app.BOT_SERVER_PORT'));
$server->listen($socket);
$loop->run();
Laravel to ReactPHP
These calls are received from the component where the seller controls the event, using Http
:
$url = config('app.BOT_SERVER_URL') . ':' . config('app.BOT_SERVER_PORT') . '/set_timer';
$data = [
'event_id' => $this->event->id,
];
$response = Http::withQueryParameters($data)->get($url);
Starting the Bot
To start the emulation, we set a periodic timer,
$timer = $loop->addPeriodicTimer($this->period_in_seconds, function () use ($event_id) {
$this->send_bid($event_id);
$this->send_message($event_id);
});
We store the timer in an array:
$this->timers[$event_id] = $timer;
Stopping the Bot
$loop->cancelTimer($this->timers[$event_id]);
unset($this->timers[$event_id]);
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