When speaking from a conceptual point of view, is it standard practice to mix WebSockets and HTTP requests when making a chat application (or any application that requires real-time communication between devices)?
Imagine a scenario with a client and a server in a chat app. What would be the best approach for connecting and sending data between the client and the server? Would it be using sockets for both sending and receiving or HTTP requests for sending (so the client would get a response and then know if the message was received), and then using WebSocket for only receiving new messages?
No this is not standard practice.
If you need real-time communication between client and server you normally just use a websocket connection and keep that one open. The client can send messages to the server and receive messages through the same connection.
Using HTTP requests for sending messages to the server and receiving new messages via websocket seems odd and just adds unnecessary complexity.
Now if your server has some endpoints to subscribe for real-time data e.g. a chat room and endpoints for getting information you don't necessary want to subscribe to e.g. information about a certain user, than you can use the appropriate protocol for each endpoint
Related
I have a question regarding http requests and responses.
I know that I can send a request to a server from my device (I can build and send a GET request to http://google.com for example). But what if I am Google and I want to send a request from the server to the user's device? How do I do that?
I understand that when the server receives a request, it can answer it, but in this case I want the server to send the request to the user's device. Just like WhatsApp does when you receive a new message.
Thanks for the help!
There are several options for sending information from the server to a client:
Push notifications - depends on the platform you are using
Constructing a Websocket connection that allows bi-directional communication
I'm sure there are more options but those are the two that come up to my mind right away.
It really depends on your application use case. For example, a chat application would like to have a socket open between it and the server so it can update frequently on new messages, etc. On the other had some simple Calendar applications might want to use push notifications to send reminders on certain dates and times.
Consider the following diagram (source). The diagram describes an HTTP Push model with multiple events pushed to the client over a persistent connection.
How does one establish a persistent connection in HTTP?
How could the server push events to the client over this connection? To my knowledge, only the client (e.g. browser) can initiate HTTP requests.
I can see this working with a WebSocket (full-duplex long-lived connections) but to my knowledge, they don't go over HTTP.
While I'm writing a service with grpc, I'm trying to compare http/2 with websocket by server side pushing mechanism.
I know for websocket, the client will send a request with Upgrade: WebSocket and Connection: Upgrade headers to server and establish the long-lived connection. Then server will send the data freely after the connection is established.
But for grpc, as it is routed upon http/2, from the wiki page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2_Server_Push, it says the server would need to predict the potential requests the client would send, and send a PUSH_PROMISE frame as early as possible.
Here are my two questions:
Does it mean that the server would also need to receive a corresponding response(request) from client in response to this PUSH_PROMISE header to decide if client wants to receive or decline the certain push?
In Grpc, if I have a sever side streaming, say send a message every 1 second from server. Does it mean the server need to send a PUSH_PROMISE to client every 1 second or at least before every data frame that server pushes to client?
gRPC does not currently support/use PUSH_PROMISE.
Streaming RPCs in gRPC use HTTP/2 streams; the entire RPC is contained in a request/response in HTTP. The main difference is that HTTP/2 implementations generally allow such streams to be streaming and bidirectional (the client can send more in the request after reading part of the response), while in HTTP/1 that was hit-or-miss.
In gRPC the client will always initiate the RPC. But for server-streaming the server can then reply with multiple messages over time via the stream. This would be similar to the scenario you described with websockets.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EventSource
The EventSource interface is web content's interface to server-sent events. An EventSource instance opens a persistent connection to an HTTP server, which sends events in text/event-stream format. The connection remains open until closed by calling EventSource.close().
From what I understand server-sent events require persistent HTTP connection (Connection: keep-alive) so similarly to keeping the connection alive like in case of web sockets.
If the connection is persistent, why server-sent events are unidirectional? Web socket connections are persistent as well.
In this case, what happens if I send a request to my HTTP service and I have persistent connection opened due to EventSource. Will it re-use HTTP connection opened by EventSource or open a new connection?
If it re-uses the connection opened by EventSource how is it considered unidirectional?
Might be trivial, but I had to ask because it is not clear. Because nothing mentions what happens to subsequent HTTP requests when there's existing connection opened by EventSource.
For example, it seems possible to me to implement centralized chat app using SSE:
User 1 sends message to User 2(by sending it to HTTP server). Server sends event to user 2 with a new message, user 2 sends another request to HTTP server with message for User 1, server sends event to user 1.
How is that not considered bi-directional?
Related:
What's the behavioral difference between HTTP Stay-Alive and Websockets?
SSE is unidirectional because when you open a SSE connection, only the server can send data to the client (browser, etc.). The client cannot send any data. SSE is a bit older than WebSockets, hence may be the difference between the unidirectional and bi-directional support between these two technos.
In your use-case, if you open a SSE connection (which is an HTTP connection), only the server will be able to send data. If you wish to send a request to your HTTP service, you will need to open a new "classical" HTTP connection. You will see your browser opening two HTTP connections: 1 for the SSE connection and 1 for the classical HTTP request (short live).
You can implement a chat with SSE. You can have a SSE connection (hence HTTP) to let the user receives the messages from the server. And you can use POST HTTP requests to enable the user to send his/her messages.
Note that most of the browsers can open around 6 HTTP/1.x connections to the same host. So, if you use 1 SSE connection, it will remain potentially 5 HTTP/1.x connections. This is only true with HTTP/1.x. With HTTP 2.x, the connections to the same host are multiplexed: so, in theory, you can send as many HTTP requests at the same time as you wish or you can open as many SSE connections as you wish and thus, by passing the limitation of the 6 connections.
You can have a look at this article (https://streamdata.io/blog/push-sse-vs-websockets/) and this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDDp7BiSad4) to get an insight about this technology and whether it could fit your needs. They summarize pros & cons of both SSE and WebSockets.
I have started to develop a Rails application, and decided to use websockets as a way to push notifications to the client - and am using basic HTTP requests to get and manipulate data on the server.
Now, websockets allows you to send messages from the client to the server, a feature I currently am not sure when to use - I mean I can always do post requests.
This feels somewhat odd to me - so I guess I am doing something wrong - why should I send HTTP requests when there is already a connection between the client and the server? it could just send a message through the websocket, and request the data to be pushed back to it.
I guess the websocket protocol isn't meant to fully replace http - and servers should support both - so I am wondering, what was the intended usage? - when should I send messages from the client through the websocket and when should I use POST for example?