I did a lot of websocket first development, since I ported various plain TCP based communication frameworks to websockets. You can do lots of cool stuff there, from plain request/response protocols that are faster than HTTP/1 to advanced stuff like publish/subscribe mechanisms and even protocols that keep the clients state automatically synchronized to the server side.
For advanced use-cases that's certainly a way to explore. For the average user I'm not sure whether I would recommend to go the route. You lose a lot of stuff that HTTP gives you out of the box, e.g. a request/response abstraction, dozens of frameworks and mechanisms for authorization, logging, etc. HTTP is also easily load-balanceable, while websockets are not. HTTP/2 in principal makes small request/response exchanges as fast as you could implement them with a custom websocket protocol, so there's no more gain. And SSE allow to push server updates in a form that still fits the HTTP model and frameworks pretty good. There are still lots of ways in which websockets can improve reactivity, but you have to invest a lot of engineering effort into it, which might not be worth it depending on the application.
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I did a lot of websocket first development, since I ported various plain TCP based communication frameworks to websockets. You can do lots of cool stuff there, from plain request/response protocols that are faster than HTTP/1 to advanced stuff like publish/subscribe mechanisms and even protocols that keep the clients state automatically synchronized to the server side.
For advanced use-cases that's certainly a way to explore. For the average user I'm not sure whether I would recommend to go the route. You lose a lot of stuff that HTTP gives you out of the box, e.g. a request/response abstraction, dozens of frameworks and mechanisms for authorization, logging, etc. HTTP is also easily load-balanceable, while websockets are not. HTTP/2 in principal makes small request/response exchanges as fast as you could implement them with a custom websocket protocol, so there's no more gain. And SSE allow to push server updates in a form that still fits the HTTP model and frameworks pretty good. There are still lots of ways in which websockets can improve reactivity, but you have to invest a lot of engineering effort into it, which might not be worth it depending on the application.