[I] Split broadcast and connector plugins

[steffendietz]

Would it make sense to extract the broadcast functionality from the websockets plugin?

For example when thinking about a (potential future) sse plugin, which is also connected to the same broadcast channels. Then this nesting of functionality could cause problems down the line.

What do you think? Am I overthinking this?

[rustatian]

Hey @steffendietz. I guess it would. But if you want to use single-node RR with websockets, you may use websockets with the memory plugin.
Or might be I have misunderstood your idea. Could you please describe your case in detail?

[steffendietz]

Currently websockets are used to let a browser connect to broadcast topics.
There is another method of pushing data to the browser called server sent events.
Similar to websockets the connection is not closed, but kept open, so that the server can continue to push data to the client.

I realize that roadrunner does not currently have SSE support, but I was just pondering if it would make sense to detach the internal broadcast handling (connecting to memory or redis broker) from the delivery method (websockets, sse, ...).

[rustatian]

Got u. You are lucky 😄 , because I have designed a broadcast (pub-sub) interface without bounding it to the only WebSocket protocol. You can have any Subscriber (sse in your case) with any desired storage (even just raw memory) under the hood. From my POV, this is a good idea to support SSE in the RR2. If you don't mind, could you please create a feature request with a link to this discussion and description?

[steffendietz]

Okay. Great. Yes. I will do so.

The broadcast plugin of RoadRunner 1.0 also implemented the drivers (memory, redis, ...) and the broadcast-ws plugin then internally connected to the broadcast plugin.

So I thought seperating this again, so that you can have a future broadcast-sse plugin would make sense.

I think I just didn't realize, that the memory and redis plugins now essentially are the broadcast plugin, since they implement the pub-sub interface.

Thanks for clearing this up. :)

[wolfy-j]

You should be able to use multiple brokers and pipelines to avoid interception. We plan to use broadcast for many other things within the RoadRunner.

[steffendietz]

Great news regarding #729. Best possible outcome I could hope for. 👍