Streaming APIs: choosing SSE or WebSocket with recovery in mind
Choose a transport by communication pattern, then design event parsing, partial states, backpressure, and reconnects.
Make the contract as clear as the fast path.
An API becomes useful when its consumers understand not just the successful response, but the deadline, overload behavior, and recovery rules around it. These guides focus on frequent requests and continuing event streams without reducing performance to a single throughput claim. Start with bounded queues and operation-aware retries, then examine the difference between a network chunk, an application event, and a complete result.
Explore the API engineering hubChoose a transport by communication pattern, then design event parsing, partial states, backpressure, and reconnects.
Design an API around useful throughput, bounded queues, operation-aware retries, and tail latency.