Http polling came across my mind, but I always thought "No I won't do that". But in my noob mind it was full of http overhead and it must be ws like interaction. Apparently it was a thing, Facebook and a lot others use it.

And laravel, it was everything I knew. I really liked it, the orm was superb, the template engine was superb. It has it downside though, the big amount of code need to be parsed.