WebSocket communication for real-time applications – live dashboards, chats and notifications delivered instantly and without polling. With conventional polling the server answers a hundred times pointlessly to answer usefully once; WebSockets invert that ratio.

Typical deployments

Dispatcher and operator screens that must always show the current state. In-app chat and support. Live views of orders, production or delivery. Notifications when long-running jobs finish, so users need not refresh. And collaborative interfaces where several people work on the same record at once.

What has to be handled

  • Automatic reconnection and catching up on changes missed during an outage.
  • Authentication and authorisation of the connection, so no client receives foreign data.
  • Scaling across several servers with shared message distribution.
  • Rate limiting, so clients are not flooded with pointless updates.
  • A fallback for networks that block persistent connections.

How we assess it

Not every application needs a persistent connection. If data changes once every few minutes, a simple background refresh is cheaper and less fragile. We use WebSockets where latency has a real cost – capacity, pricing, reservations or coordinating people in the field.

We design it so the application still works when the connection is unavailable.

Frequently asked questions

Do we need a separate server for this?

Not necessarily. With a modest number of concurrent users the same infrastructure that serves the site handles the connections. At higher numbers we separate the real-time layer so an outage or load spike in one part does not affect the other.

What if a customer's corporate network blocks persistent connections?

The application falls back to an alternative transport and keeps working, only with more latency. We test this behaviour in advance so the problem does not first appear at a specific client in production.