Is SSE in 2014 what Ajax was in 2005?

Isn't this just a trailing GET? This technique has been around since the 90's and has been used in lots of applications.

The comparison to AJAX in 2005 is a little odd for me, as this is already a pretty mature technique. AJAX in 2005 was pretty novel because the prior (to Google, and others) use-case was for early Microsoft web apps tied heavily to IE.

SSE = Streaming SIMD Extensions in my brain. They should name it something else.

I've played with implementing both SSE and websockets on embedded hardware, and SSE is nice because of the simplicity--no need to do a handshake or other setup like with websockets. If you're primarily sending data from the server to the browser, SSE + a simple REST api (to send data back from browser to server) is a pretty nice combo.

Doesn't seem as big a change as what Ajax was back when. Before Ajax there was no async interaction from the browser to the webserver. SSE is just another way to do async, except it's now push instead of pull...

SSE ?