Imagine that your country’s national basketball team is playing for the World Basketball Championship. You want to keep track of the game, but you can’t watch it because it takes place while you’re at work.
Luckily for you, your national news service has a crackerjack web development team. They’ve built a sports ticker that updates with every foul called or basket scored. You visit a URL, and updates are pushed right to your browser. Of course, you wonder how they did that. The answer? Server-sent events.
Tiffany Brown at SitePoint wrote an article server-sent events.