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Comment by technicolorwhat | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, we're also pushing for SSE for this kind of things.

I had previously used SSE in a project and had no idea it existed or that it was widely supported by most browsers. It's a beautiful and straightforward technology, but it doesn't seem to be as widely used as it should be, and more tooling is required. Also more tooling is required.

100% onboard with better tooling.

Starting with out of the box swagger support: https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/issues/396

Shame they are not interested in adding it.

The really huge issue with SSE, and the reason why it’s historically been dismissed, is that it us subject to (and counts towards) the HTTP 1.1 domain connection limit.

Sadly that makes it a bit of a pain in the ass to manage for sites served as (/ compatible with) http 1.1.

I know SSE works on scenarios with few or no state updates, like in dashboard UI's. What about other cases where they deal with input data? like in a chat/game

That’s the beauty, the client just do a normal HTTP request. It really simplify the system.

Does SSE work reliably in mobile browsers nowadays? A few years back when I tried, it was working OK in Chrome for Android but mobile browser support didn't seem complete.

Sadly, there are very few mobile browsers that aren't Chrome or Safari. In fact, Safari/Webkit is the only mobile browser engine available on IOS at all -- all other browsers are just chrome (pun intended) around IOS webkit.

To your point, https://caniuse.com/eventsource

Also there are polyfills for very old browsers like IE.

Having a standard for what events look like is a decent idea as people generally just make some random thing up without thinking too hard and having a standard is generally helpful - but making your own polling system etc when there's already a battle tested one available seems like wasted effort and a bit counterproductive

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