[julianlam]

This is really interesting! I wonder why it never really took off, whereas websockets via Socket.IO/Engine.io did.

At NodeBB, we ended up relying on websockets for almost everything, which was a mistake. We were using it for simple call-and-response actions, where a proper RESTful API would've been a better (more scalable, better supported, etc.) solution.

In the end, we migrated a large part of our existing socket.io implementation to use plain REST. SSE sounds like the second part of that solution, so we can ditch socket.io completely if we really wanted to.

Very cool!

[shahinghasemi]

> At NodeBB, we ended up relying on websockets for almost everything, which was a mistake.

Would you please elaborate on the challenges/disadvantages you've encountered in comparison to REST/HTTP?

[julianlam]

Nothing major, just browser support at the beginning, reverse proxy support (which is no longer an issue), but the big one was extensibility.

As it turns out, while almost anyone can fire off a POST request, not many people know how to wire up a socket.io client.