| This is a great answer! Although I personally believe that with present-day framework performance spanning multiple orders of magnitude, the lower-performance frameworks have a substantial amount of ground to cover before I personally would consider using them. Higher-performance frameworks have, for my use-cases and in my opinion, reached or nearly reached parity in developer efficiency while providing significant pain-reduction on the performance and scale side. In other words, why not enjoy both performance and efficiency? That said, everything is evolving, so whatever we see today is subject to change. As you said, our answers to this question will be a matter of opinion and belief about what will happen in the future. Looking forward with only the context of today's technologies, I personally believe that WebSocket and the various protocols built on top of it may eventually supersede the conventional HTTP request-response conversation. To me, this would mean simpler and more direct communication between client and server, putting the two on equal footing with respect to the conversation semantics (the server can take the lead, for example). It's something I have been wanting ever since I replaced an old client-server app with a web application in the late 1990s with a boggled sense of "Why am I shoehorning an application on top of this hypertext document fetching protocol?" So when building an application today, I like selecting platforms and frameworks that have natively implemented WebSocket. But echoing your point again, it's impossible to know what else will come up in a few years' time. Unless your system needs to survive for a very long time, technology is too unpredictable to expend that much worry on the long-term future. |