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Of course, the limitation of SSE is that it's not bidirectional - as the name implies, only the server can send messages to the client. SSE is definitely useful, especially when you don't need the full overhead of a WebSockets server, but the "hype around WebSockets" is largely because you can implement two-way connections with it. Yesterday there was actually a HN post where someone created a full TCP proxy using WebSockets.

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I completely agree that WebSockets are a very good innovation and have their place but I do think that there are a lot of situations where you can achieve the same result easer with SSE and using a HTTP PUT to send messages back to the server.

For example a collaborative project management tool like Asana where saves are silent and update live on other peoples screens is a better place for SSE and a REST api than WebSockets, where as a real time game is probably a good place to the latter.

The TCP proxy use case, which has been my primary motivation for WebSocket since day one, points to another limitation of SSE. SSE cannot handle binary data without encoding the data into text. WebSocket can.

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