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iomcr | 5 years ago

I feel like websockets get waaay too much hype and attention compared to SSE, especially for use cases that are barely interactive at all.

discuss

anderspitman|5 years ago

Sadly it's not entirely unfounded. SSE on HTTP/1.1 is basically useless due to the connections-per-domain limits implemented in browsers. So WebSockets got a lot of mindshare while we waited for HTTP/2.

But today I always start with plain HTTP, then try SSE, and finally WebSockets if I have to.

viklove|5 years ago

Future-proofing is a good use case though. As a developer I don't want to maintain both SSE and WebSockets, since they solve similar problems and WebSockets are a superset of SSE. Even though my WebSockets implementation is currently unidirectional (server to client), I still opted for that over SSE because I'll probably need send data the other way at some point in the future. Why learn two tools when I can just learn one?

cyral|5 years ago

If you use nginx, you can use the excellent nchan module to push messages by having your backend make a POST request to nginx. Clients can connect to nchan via websockets, SSE, and few other things like long polling without your app having to support all of them. Been using it for a recent project and really like it.

anderspitman|5 years ago

What's wrong with normal HTTP requests for client->server streams? You get the added bonus of being able to dump them to a curl command for debugging.