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A comment on Show HN: Heartbeat – Transform REST Endpoints to Streaming APIs. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: Heartbeat – Transform REST Endpoints to Streamin... by xg15 on Wednesday August 03, 2016 @05:31PM (#12221688)
I wonder though, doesn't SSE technically violate a lot of HTTP's assumptions? From the point of view of a HTTP middlebox, a SSE response would basically be a single endless entity, transmitted at a very low bandwidth. I'm no expert at real-world deployment of SSE, but that they sounds to me like it could break a lot of proxies that don't have special handling for SSE. (Or at least cause unnecessary resource consumption for those proxies)

Also I wonder why there are not more websocket-based APIs. WS has the same widespread support and ready-made debug tools as HTTP and seemed to be designed exactly for push or non request/response use cases. So, out of couriosity, why would SSE be preferred over WS?

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Re:Show HN: Heartbeat – Transform REST Endpoints to Streamin... by niftich on Wednesday August 03, 2016 @11:55PM (#12223286)
Streamdata.io (linked in a different post) has blogged [1] about why they chose SSE instead of WS. Additionally, WS drops you down to something very similar to raw TCP, so you have to bring your own application-level message framing, while SSE comes with its own minimalistic format. From a middle box's perspective, SSE isn't that different from streaming video or long polling, although the SSE recommendation [2] does have a line about older proxies:

"Legacy proxy servers are known to, in certain cases, drop HTTP connections after a short timeout. To protect against such proxy servers, authors can include a comment line (one starting with a ':' character) every 15 seconds or so."

[1] http://streamdata.io/blog/push-sse-vs-websockets/

[2] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/comms.html#authoring-...

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Re:Show HN: Heartbeat – Transform REST Endpoints to Streamin... by xg15 on Friday August 05, 2016 @01:14PM (#12234068)
As far as I know, two of the few things WS does on top of TCP are in fact: making endpoints URL-addressable - and providing message framing. You can even have text-only frames with a well-defined encoding.

In any way though, thanks for the links. I haven't given them a deep read yet but will definitely do so soon.

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