Yes, Fanout works as a publish-subscribe service. Clients listen on channels (topics), and you publish messages to channels which Fanout then delivers to the ri

Yes, Fanout works as a publish-subscribe service. Clients listen on channels (topics), and you publish messages to channels which Fanout then delivers to the right clients. In the case of HTTP streaming, Fanout acts like a reverse proxy in front of your web server. Incoming requests are relayed to your server, and you can control Fanout's behavior depending on how you reply. For example, you can reply with a "hold" instruction saying to bind the incoming request to streaming channel C. The transaction between Fanout and your server is now complete, while the connection between the client and Fanout remains open. You can then send messages to this client by publishing on channel C. The process is explained in more detail on this post about our open source reference implementation: http://blog.fanout.io/2013/04/09/an-http-reverse-proxy-for-realtime/ http://blog.fanout.io/2013/04/09/an-http-reverse-proxy-for-r... Implementing something like SSE is just a matter of responding with a stream subscribe with initial response of Content-Type: text/event-stream, and then publishing event chunks using SSE formatting.