There has been a lot of exciting talk recently about the future of the Vaadin framework. Progressive Web Apps, move from GWT… It sounds like a bright future. One detail - does anyone know what is the future of push technology? With Servlet 4.0, HTTP2, Server-Sent Events, do we still need Websocket? On the good side, Vaadin push has worked miracles since V7 and continues to work perfectly for users today. However it’s not so elegant. Logs are littered with warnings and stack traces, especially when a mobile client disconnects. I wonder if a change of technology is planned, and if it might bring additional simplicity and more error-free operation?
The state of push technology in browsers is unfortunately the same as it has been for several years already.
- SSE is still not supported in Microsoft’s browsers.
- Both WebSockets and any variation of long-running HTTP requests (including SSE) have a tendency of getting stuck in HTTP proxies.
- HTTP/2 push is about pushing file contents and thus not applicable in this context.
The main potential for improvement is thus to improve specific cases with the current technologies.