Tournaments ~ Implementing the Live Chat in Tournaments - uchicago-cs/chigame GitHub Wiki

Use a Combination of Regular Frontend Query and Robust Backend CRUD Suites to implement live chat

Rather than real-time communication, fetch new messages from the backend regularly (e.g. every 1 seconds).

Some advantages:

• Simpler to implement than WebSockets
• Built on common REST API patterns
• Leverages robust backend CRUD & storage

To implement:

• Create frontend component to fetch messages from API endpoint
• Backend API retrieves new messages from database
• Frontend polls API to check for message updates
• Shows new messages in real-time-like fashion

Some considerations:

• Added latency compared to WebSockets
• Potential overfetching/underfetching of updates
• More API requests required