Simple PHP socket-based terminal chat

Some time ago I decided it would be interesting to write an extremely simple PHP terminal chat to try out PHP's sockets and the socket_select() function usage. If you're not in to reading, feel free to skip to the samples and/or the sources ;)

What is a socket_select() (or *_select() for that matter) you ask?

Opening a PHP to Java socket

In a project I've been working on recently we needed to integrate a functionality we have in a few Java classes we developed in to a PHP script. If those specific classes could be wrapped in a simple command-line app, it would not have been a problem, as you can execute command-line apps from PHP easily. But! These specific Java classes took very long time to load (around two seconds!) before they could be used.