Mastering WebSockets: Real-Time Communication Patterns in Modern Web Applications

Introduction: The Shift from Request-Response to Persistent Streams In the early days of the web, the Request-Response cycle was the undisputed law of the land. A client requested a resource, the server processed it, sent a response, and the connection was promptly severed. This stateless architecture, defined by HTTP/1.0 and later refined in HTTP/1.1, was perfect for a document-based web. However, as we transitioned from static pages to dynamic applications—Single Page Applications (SPAs), coll