With the tech world increasingly moving towards an event-driven architecture, it’s becoming crucial to include live elements in every application that updates in realtime. This discussion quickly moves on to the complexity of the event-driven world and the diverse set of protocols that exist to move data around. With well-known protocols such as WebSockets, SSE, and MQTT thrown about it’s easy to miss their distinguishing features and perceive them as if they’re competing against each other. In this talk, I run through the protocol level working of event driven applications. I will then focus particularly on Server-Sent Events, i.e. the SSE protocol and explain the best scenarios where SSE wins over the other options.