Jonathan Martin: The Realtime Web: We're Doing it Wrong.

Even with WebSockets, Server Sent Events, and WebRTC at our disposal, we continue to treat realtime interactions as a selective enhancement we can hack on to a subset of features after product launch.

Our antiquated MVP design assumption has been to forgo realtime interactivity. As web apps become the next generation of desktop apps, this assumption is no longer acceptable: we need to take a realtime-from-the-onset approach. However, this mindset brings with it new architectural challenges that remain largely unaddressed. - What type(s) of software components should be realtime? - Could the realtime paradigm be reduced to a simple protocol? - Can we keep authorization code DRY while presenting both HTTP and WebSocket based APIs? - How can we stick with a fat client, but expose an extensive querying API without compromising on DRY or security?

We’ll examine these problems from the client and server-side, consider potential solutions, then code a solution in JS for a concrete app.

We've got the tools. We just need to stop monkey patching together one-off solutions.