ES08 - Real Time Updates
Revisions
- Initial version v1 (September 2, 2026).
| Version | Date | Changelog |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | 2026-09-02 | Initial version. |
Summary
This specification adds details about how real-time updates are implemented for this platform as a whole.
Assymetric Model
The model is assymetric with REST for updates (such as POST, UPDATE, PATCH, DELETE, etc.) but the client is expected to subscribe to the bus with an event stream to receive unidirectional updates.
The reasoning for this is that, this only required real-time updates, but no need for real-time synchronization for all actions. Mutating actions can be kept to REST for simplicity and ease of development, whereas updates can leverage SSE for real-time yet much simpler than WebSockets.
If one of the following constraints are true, a migration to WS may be taken into consideration:
- Updates are short, extremely frequent and requires real-time updates on all of them.
- Positions of cursors for editors and management screens require real-time synchronization for some reason.
- More situations that I don’t know yet.
Updates
Updates for creations, patches, or deletions should use REST for simplicity.
Updates that mutate that should be notified should publish an event via ScopedEvent. The EventTarget can be chosen by the handler, that dictates which sets of streamers can catch that event.
All events are published to Valkey as a tag, then Valkey would publish back to the only subscriber runner, which then does one more round of passing it down all streams.
Reads
For reads and events, subscribe to /v1/sse using a GET method, which should stream down events as the table below.
A RequestContext is copied at the SSE connection. If role permissions are changed, a reload is required. This is subject to change, as it’s not secure but for MVP, it was decided for simplicity.
Events Table
| Event | Route | Trigger Reason |
|---|---|---|
PONG | /sse/ping | Pings to check whether the current SSE works. |