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There is actually a way to do streaming over HTTP without doing WebSockets. It's called "Server Sent Events" and is implemented in the EventSource API in Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

It's quite easy to fall back to long polling in older browsers and it's a very simple and straight forward format.

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Yes you can certainly stream and do message passing within HTTP (for some browsers) but you can't, for instance, return headers more than once without your own application protocol.

The most interesting bit about this architecture for me is the 1:1 mapping with a pure HTTP resource. It's a bit like an implicit subscription to a pub-sub enabled resource. In this implementation we are simply calling our API like we normally would (except on the stream domain) and waiting for an update.

Or make life real simple and just use Socket.io

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