Polling & WebSocket: Real-Time Communication for Engineers

Understand how polling and WebSocket work under the hood, know the trade-offs of each, and confidently decide which to reach for in production systems

5 sections ยท 14 lessons

Course outline

The Real-Time Problem

  1. Why Real-Time Is Hard
  2. The Client-Server Communication Models

Polling

  1. Short Polling: How It Works
  2. Long Polling: How It Works
  3. Polling in Practice: Patterns and Gotchas
  4. Resilient Polling in Serverless Architectures

WebSocket

  1. The WebSocket Handshake and Protocol
  2. Sending and Receiving: Full-Duplex in Action
  3. WebSocket in Production: Scaling and Infrastructure

Polling vs. WebSocket: Making the Decision

  1. Comparing the Trade-offs
  2. The Decision Framework
  3. Common Misconceptions

Beyond Polling and WebSocket

  1. Server-Sent Events (SSE): The Middle Ground
  2. Choosing Between SSE, Polling, and WebSocket

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