WebSocket Patterns
WebSockets provide a long-lived bidirectional connection between client and server. They are useful when the application needs to push updates without polling.
Where it fits
This pattern matters for realtime coordination, live game state, collaborative views, or streaming status updates that are awkward to express as plain REST endpoints.
Repeated project patterns
- Study Duel uses websocket connections for duel state and realtime gameplay coordination.
- In practice, websocket systems usually still sit beside a normal HTTP API for auth, configuration, and durable state transitions.
- Reverse proxies such as Traefik need to route websocket upgrades cleanly under the same domain as the main API.
Trade-offs
- Realtime systems add state management, connection lifecycle handling, and harder test scenarios.
- Authentication, reconnect behavior, and fan-out often require support from services such as Redis.