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Comment by contravariant | Hacker News Reader

Though you can't avoid seeing an item just before it is deleted and skipping an item just before it is created. This isn't a huge problem but does mean that the list you end up with may not be a coherent view of the database. But if you require guarantees like that then you might be better of just using SQL directly.

Or just include everything in a single response, HTTPS was designed to handle arbitrary length payloads if I recall correctly. You might want to use a more streamable format than JSON though.

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If you care about that kind of guarantee you might want to keep a connection open and stream new updates.

> If you care about that kind of guarantee you might want to keep a connection open and stream new updates.

You don't need that. You just need to get the collection resource to be cacheable and subsequently track your resources' state with conditional requests.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Conditiona...

> use a more streamable format than JSON

Did you mean we should stream data over WebSocket or use HTTP/2 or do we need to do something different altogether?

AFAIK chunked transfer works specifically with HTTP 1.1, think Kubernetes for example uses this with JSON in a few prominent places for things like WATCH. But that setup is hardly ideal for the use case.

Check out MessagePack.

https://msgpack.org/

I don't think you need to do anything difficult you can just treat it as one big file, pretty sure online radio streams have been using this technique for ages. Though I'm not too sure about the particulars.

This is annoying to do with JSON though because you need to remember to close all your brackets, something like CSV is a lot easier because you can just write the header once and then just stream the data.

Edit: Looks like Python supports this using chunked transfer by simply providing the HTTP request data as an iterator.

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