AnyCable Long Polling Transport

This package provides a long polling transport implementation for AnyCable.

Why long-polling in 202x? Even though WebSockets are widely supported, they still can be blocked by corporate firewalls and proxies. Long polling is a simplest alternative for such cases.

NOTE: Server-side long-polling support is a part of AnyCable PRO.

Usage

Long polling is consisered to be a fallback transport, so you need to configure it as follows:

import { createCable } from '@anycable/web'
import { LongPollingTransport } from '@anycable/long-polling'

// Create a transport object and pass the URL to the AnyCable server's long polling endpoint
const lp = new LongPollingTransport('http://my.anycable.host/lp')

// Pass the transport to the createCable or createConsumer function via the `fallbacks` option
export default createCable({fallbacks: [lp]})

Using long polling as a primary transport

You can use long polling as a primary transport by specifying it via the transport option:

import { createCable } from '@anycable/web'
import { LongPollingTransport } from '@anycable/long-polling'

const transport = new LongPollingTransport('http://my.anycable.host/lp')

export default createCable({transport})

Available options

You can pass the following options to the LongPollingTransport constructor (all options are optional, defaults are shown below):

new LongPollingTransport(
  url,
  {
    cooldownPeriod: 500, // For how long (in ms) to wait before sending a new request
    sendBuffer: 500, // For how long to buffer outgoing commands (in ms) before sending them to the server
    pingInterval: 30000, // How often (in ms) to emit emulated ping messages (to make connection monitor think that the connection is alive)
    credentials: 'same-origin', // Underlying fetch credentials
    fetchImplementation: fetch, // A fetch-compatible implementation (e.g. node-fetch)
  }
)

IMPORTANT: When using headers as authentication method, we omit client's credentials when performing HTTP requests (credential: "omit" in fetch). When using cookies, we send cookies with the request (using credentials: "include" configuration). Keep this in mind if your clients authentication relies on cookies.

Legacy browsers support

This package uses fetch to perform requests and AbortController to cancel in-flight requests when necessary. Both APIs are not supported in legacy browsers (e.g., Internet Explorer). You must configure polyfills for them yourself. We recommend using whatwg-fetch and abortcontroller-polyfill packages.

See also anycable-browser-playground project for a working example.