The Best Way to Send Data From Backend to Frontend: Server Sent Events

Data Transfer Methods: 

There are many ways to transfer data between the server and the client. Let’s look at a few of them in detail!

1.) HTTP connection over TCP: It is a short-lived connection where the client requests for something from the server and the server sends it back to the client immediately and the connection is closed.

2.) Websockets: Opens a pipe between the client and server which allows both of them to simultaneously speak to each other. These are mainly seen in chat applications.

3.) Polling: Polling is kind of a compromise between HTTP and Websockets. Where Polling says I just want to ping the server every few seconds and see if there is any new information and I will keep doing that again and again until I get some kind of new information from the client-side and vice versa, this is an example of short-polling. Long polling on the other hand doesn’t send back a response until and unless it has some new information.

Polling vs Server-Sent Events. 

Server-Sent events establish an HTTP connection between the client and the server and create a special form of conveying data between the server and the client in such a way that it opens a connection that is stable using an event source where the server has the ability to send data bidirectionally.