You don't need web sockets to do this. Check out ext.direct. It does exactly this over xhr. I do something similar, with json-rpc as intermediate. The problem

You don't need web sockets to do this. Check out ext.direct. It does exactly this over xhr. I do something similar, with json-rpc as intermediate. The problem with REST is that people try to wrap rpc-style api's in a restful container, and it just doesn't do that well enough.