VietMX Staff asked 3 years ago
A WebSocket is a continuous connection between client and server. That continuous connection allows the following:
- Data can be sent from server to client at any time, without the client even requesting it. This is often called server-push and is very valuable for applications where the client needs to know fairly quickly when something happens on the server (like a new chat messages has been received or a new price has been udpated). A client cannot be pushed data over http. The client would have to regularly poll by making an http request every few seconds in order to get timely new data. Client polling is not efficient.
- Data can be sent either way very efficiently. Because the connection is already established and a webSocket data frame is very efficiently organized, one can send data a lot more efficiently that via an HTTP request that necessarily contains headers, cookies, etc…
