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by 90minuteAPI 2220 days ago
Server Sent Events and HTTP? With a modern setup it’s going to be sharing an HTTP/2 pipe anyway. Even handles disconnections gracefully/transparently if you’re clever about it.

Can anyone expand on why this technique isn’t more common? I’m so sick of seeing folks reinvent HTTP (poorly) on top of WebSockets. I get if extreme low latency is (allegedly) a requirement.
4 comments
verandaguy 2220 days ago
>Can anyone expand on why this technique isn’t more common?

Hard answer: WS has been around for longer, and it's had more "marketing" for lack of a better word -- more people know about it and know how to use it. Retooling existing WS-using code to use HTTP/2 pipes would be a considerable effort with little to no perceived benefit to most users and teams.

Speculative answer: most web developers live closer to the application and presentation layers, and there's resistance to learning technologies that involve HTTP connection management e.g. in nginx (not to say that there are none of these, there are just fewer of us). WS was at the right place at the right time with a good high-level interface available to the client, and gained traction because of this.

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iokanuon 2220 days ago
From what I remember about SSE, no Microsoft browser supported them. It seems like they've finally added support to Edge this year though.
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pennaMan 2220 days ago
SSE have a limit of 6 connections across all browser tabs

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=906896 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=275955

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anderspitman 2220 days ago
If you're using HTTP/2 this problem goes away.
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nemothekid 2219 days ago
>Can anyone expand on why this technique isn’t more common?

Because WebSockets is 10 years old and HTTP/2 is 5 years old, and that's not including support in major frameworks for SSE.

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