Imagine you’re watching a stock market dashboard. Prices keep changing every second, sometimes multiple times in a second.
Would you prefer hitting refresh constantly, or having updates flow to you automatically?
That’s exactly where Server-Sent Events (SSE) shine. SSE provides a simple, reliable way for a server to continuously push updates to a client over a single HTTP connection.
In this article, we’ll break down what SSE is, how it works, how it compares to alternatives like WebSockets, and where you’d actually use it in real-world systems.