I was looking into Firebase REST API documentation and it mentions that the REST API supports the EventSource protocol. This supposedly sends events, but is there a way to utilise them?
I looking into long polling but I’m not 100% sure that’s what I’m looking for.
The Firebase documentation mentions using the “text/event-stream” Accept header?
Section on the docs that references this.
I haven’t looked into this recently, but I think the answer is that you cannot. Your options are basically polling, or being tricky with the timeout of get-requests and having your external server send delayed responses (unless the event fired) to limit the polling frequency (as you say, longpolling).
I’m not sure if returning partial messages to further stretch this trick would work, in other frameworks that could somewhat simulate such ‘event’ behaviour. But I’m pretty sure you cannot ‘subscribe’ to a stream or do socket connections using HTTPService. Not even all browsers support SSE. Though it sure would be a neat feature, a friend of mine also has a great use case for this, though I’m not yet 100% its within the ToS (a ROBLOX client for his online card game).