Server Sent Events sounds like a great idea until someone opens your app in a few separate tabs. Then you quickly hit the limit of 6 simultaneous HTTP connections, and it looks to the user like your application is frozen or crashed.
Neither Chrome nor Firefox has any interest in fixing this.
You could hack around this with wildcard subdomains as some Comet solutions did, but that's so so ugly.
The ecosystem around websockets is much more mature, the browser support is better, and the connection limits are more sane (Firefox will make up to 200 websocket connections, last I looked). I don't consider Server Sent Events a viable option.
Neither Chrome nor Firefox has any interest in fixing this.
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=275955 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=906896
IE doesn't support Server Sent Events at all.
You could hack around this with wildcard subdomains as some Comet solutions did, but that's so so ugly.
The ecosystem around websockets is much more mature, the browser support is better, and the connection limits are more sane (Firefox will make up to 200 websocket connections, last I looked). I don't consider Server Sent Events a viable option.