What is broadcasting

Broadcasting is the process of transmitting data or information to a wide audience or multiple recipients simultaneously. It's a method used to share information, events, or messages with many people or systems at once. Broadcasting can be applied in various forms, including radio and television broadcasting, computer networks, and real-time web applications.

Lets an example to explain broadcasting

Think about a live sports event, like a football game. The game is happening in a stadium, but not everyone can be there in person. So, a television network broadcasts the game. Millions of people across the country or even worldwide can tune in to their TVs at the same time to watch the game. This is broadcasting in action – sharing a live event with a large audience in real time.

In this case, the broadcasting is not limited to just the people in the stadium but extends to all the fans who want to watch the game from the comfort of their homes or other locations, thanks to the TV network's transmission

What is Laravel broadcasting?

Laravel Broadcasting makes your web apps more interactive and real-time, so you can see updates instantly without manually refreshing the page

Laravel broadcasting allows your web application to instantly send and receive messages or updates in real-time. It's like having a live chat or notifications in your app. For example, when someone sends you a chat message, you see it right away without needing to refresh the page. Laravel takes care of the technical details to make this real-time communication possible, so you can create interactive and dynamic features in your web app without much hassle.

How to achieve broadcasting in Laravel?

If you want to implement broadcasting in Laravel, then you need to understand the prerequisites and working flow of Laravel broadcasting. So in this tutorial, you will learn all about Laravel broadcasting.

So firstly, we discuss the prerequisites for Laravel broadcasting.

1. Knowledge of Laravel basics.

2. Laravel events and listeners.

Laravel broadcasting works on events and listeners so you must know about Laravel's events and listeners. So I suggest that firstly you learn about Laravel events and listeners and then learn Laravel broadcasting.

Now we discuss, how Laravel broadcasting works.

Laravel Broadcasting uses WebSockets for real-time communication. However, Laravel itself does not provide a WebSocket server out of the box. Instead, Laravel integrates with various broadcasting drivers, like Pusher and Ably, which utilizes WebSockets.

Laravel Broadcasting involves both the server-side (backend) and the client-side(front-end) implementation. In server-side implementation, you can create and trigger the events and channels. In the client side, you listen to these events using Laravel's echo package in javascript files.

In the next chapter, we will learn that how to set up Laravel broadcasting in our application.