Comment by apitman
18 hours ago
> That said, using a vintage technology has some downsides. It was never updated to support WebSockets
With widespread browser support for WHATWG streams, it's pretty easy to implement your own WebSockets over long-lived HTTP requests. Basically you just send a byte stream and prepend each message with a header, which can just be a size in many cases.
Advantages over WebSockets:
* No special path in your server layer like you need for WebSocket.
* Backpressure
* You get to take advantage of HTTP/2/3 improvements for free
* Lower framing overhead
Unfortunately AFAIK it's still not supported to still be streaming your request body while receiving the response, so you need a pair of requests for full bidirectional streaming.
Please be aware that there is a web standard for this since quite some time. See server-sent events and the EventSource interface:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Server-sent... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EventSource
That can be used with https://mercure.rocks :)