I’m continuing to break down the technology stack as I get to know my new partner Streamdata.io. Yesterday I wrote about their use of JSON Patch for returning partial responses of changes made to an API that has been proxied through the service, and today I want to focus on understanding Server-Sent Events (SSE), which Streamdata.io uses to stream those events in real time to any consumer. In my experience, SSE is a lesser known of the real time technologies out there, but is one that holds a lot of potential, so I wanted to spend some time covering it here on the blog.
As opposed to technology that delivers a two-way stream, Server-sent events (SSE) is all about a client receiving automatic updates from a server via HTTP connection. The technology is a standard, with the Server-sent events (SSE) EventSource API being standardized as part of the HTML5 specification out of the W3C. Similar to Streamdata.io’s usage of JSON Patch, SSE is all about efficiency. Making web APIs real time isn’t always about having a two-way connection, and SEE is a great way to make things streaming in a one-way direction, only sending you what has changed in real-time using JSON Patch. Efficiency in direction, delivery, and in message. https://goo.gl/P4PAJW #DataIntegration #ML
