Craft GraphQL APIs in Elixir with Absinthe

Chapter 6Going Live with Subscriptions

In REST-oriented web frameworks, the need to have near real-time, live data streams still feels like a strange new world. It isn’t necessarily that setting up a WebSocket connection is hard (particularly if you’re using Phoenix), but rather that such connections don’t fit into the REST API paradigm very easily. Setting up connections for specific data feeds and managing the communication across them is, to say the least, awkward in a world of “resources” tightly coupled to HTTP verbs. Consequently, even in frameworks that have fantastic near real-time support, whatever approach that’s available doesn’t feel like a first-class part of the API. When your API is built solidly around the semantics ...