Cloud Native Go: Building Web Applications and Microservices for the Cloud with Go and React

11. Working with WebSockets

“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Some of us are old enough to remember the days of the web when it was expected that you had to hit the refresh button on your browser to see new data. It wasn’t until fairly recently that websites truly started embracing the interactive style, where users could expect the page to update itself as necessary.

Despite this being a recent innovation, it is now ubiquitous. Just about everyone using web applications demands such reactive behavior. If your web application isn’t dynamically updating information and notifying the user of important changes to their data, your customers are going to flee in droves. If someone impacts our data in our browser and ...