In this episode, we dive into the basics of whispering with Laravel and Alpine.js. Whispering lets clients broadcast and receive events directly to each other, without needing to define those events on the Laravel backend. This is super handy for scenarios like displaying who's typing in a chat room—there's no need to involve a round trip to your server!
We start by setting up a simple channel (it doesn't matter what type), making sure users are authorized (we just return true
for simplicity). Then, we use Alpine.js and Echo to connect to that channel. The fun part is using the whisper
method on the client side—this lets us broadcast an event (like typing
) with any payload we want, such as the current user info.
To listen for these whispers from other clients, we use the listenForWhisper
method. This works just like listening for regular server-broadcasted events. We set up a quick demonstration: after a timeout, a typing event is whispered to all connected clients, and we verify it's received everywhere.
We finish up with a note: whispering is powerful but can be intensive if you send loads of events or big payloads, so we turn off debugging in Reverb before the next episode. In the following lesson, we'll build on this foundation to broadcast live mouse movements—a much more event-heavy example!