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Why aren't streaming APIs more popular?
Why are duplexed and SSE based protocols relatively ignored by the dev community?
Postman, the application typically used for API development, doesn't have any support for Server-Sent Events (SSE), HTTP2, or Websockets. Additionally, there aren't a lot of streaming APIs to work with despite plenty of real-time apps.
Because there's such a dearth of tools, I worked these past few weeks with some friends to create a Streaming API development tool called Swell. If you're interested in contributing to that project the repo is here: https://github.com/getswell/getswell.
I'm also interested in general thoughts as to why these protocols aren't used more often.
- shams93 8y agoIt can be tough to put these into production with autoscaling on the cloud. So if you need an application level load balancer with an ecs container with fargate on aws you're going to be limited to load balancing https requests there's no support for websockets on application load balancers. Part of this is that the cloud is not great at providing tools to deploy these applications. There are tools like firebase which just give you a realtime api to work with but rolling your own is tough when the tools on aws and azure are so biased towards old fashioned rest api deployment.
- happylamp 8y agoThats a really good point! It is interesting that support for websockets on a large scale is still quite limited when it comes to AWS/Azure/Google. Probably explains why SSE is more and more a viable alternative even though it has more overhead than websockets
- discreteproj 8y agoThat makes a lot of sense. I guess I would have expected cloud providers to push the industry into newer (but stable) technologies. As web dev continues to mature and becomes increasingly interested in fast, real-time, application development, I have to think that user demand will eventually force cloud providers' hands. That said, there are clearly other considerations at hand. I definitely think there's a market to provide services that support these protocols, of which Firebase is evidence. The only problem is Firebase, while great for smaller, quick projects, has some major issues at scale.