
Why aren't streaming APIs more popular? - discreteproj
Why are duplexed and SSE based protocols relatively ignored by the dev community?<p>Postman, the application typically used for API development, doesn&#x27;t have any support for Server-Sent Events (SSE), HTTP2, or Websockets. Additionally, there aren&#x27;t a lot of streaming APIs to work with despite plenty of real-time apps.<p>Because there&#x27;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&#x27;re interested in contributing to that project the repo is here: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;getswell&#x2F;getswell.<p>I&#x27;m also interested in general thoughts as to why these protocols aren&#x27;t used more often.
======
shams93
It 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.

~~~
discreteproj
That 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.

