It's often (for work or for personal projects) that I need to create a real-time feature for a website. This can range from a simple notification whenever an event happens on the server of an existing website, to implementing a real-time multiplayer game or adding a feature inspired from social media websites.

Unfortunately the increase in complexity in code (Perl & JS) and architecture involved in setting up a reliable solution, very often made me forego the opportunity to use WebSockets for many of these projects, and instead resorted to http polling to keep the solution simple for …