Ask HN: What Is the Equivalent of These API and Protocols for Non-Browsers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Is the Equivalent of These API and Protocols for Non-Browsers?

3 pointskevindeasis3 comments

In web browsers we can do:

XHR Polling

XHR Long Polling / Comet / Hanging Http

XHR Stream / Stream API

Server Side Events

Web Sockets

What is the equivalence of those things above for non-browsers? Also, how would you do real-time in non-browsers?

I'm trying to see options to send updates to clients that are not using a web browser. I know SNS and GCM are good options for non real-time updates.

Any suggested resource with working directly with TCP?

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Non-browser alternatives for all the things listed above websocket: some application-layer protocol running on top of TCP.

Non-browser alternatives for websocket: TCP

Specifically, you're looking for messaging protocols like AMQP, MQTT, XMPP, STOMP, or even HTTP because there are other HTTP clients than just the ones inside browsers. All these protocols describe some aspects of framing and semantics, and predictably, you need both a protocol-client and a protocol-server to run them.

Stuff like SNS and GCM is Messaging-as-a-Service, where they host the server, and give you a client to integrate into your code.

Brilliant, thanks for this! I'll go check them out.

I should expand my point by saying that all the XHR stuff and Server-Sent Events are simultaneously Javascript APIs exposed in the browser's script context, but also techniques/"protocols" that an HTTP client can implement by adhering to a specific behavior.

For example, any HTTP client can receive server-sent events in the wire-level HTTP sense, like curl [1], which will just print all data being streamed to it until you abort; but it doesn't provide an API equivalent to the onMessage semantics like you get in the browser. To understand the distinction, see this github issue about adding "support" for Server-Side Events for another HTTP client here [2]. If your HTTP client library of choice doesn't provide the semantics you want, you may be able to build them in yourself.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31238626/

[2] https://github.com/square/retrofit/issues/1029

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