Top Flutter Server-Sent Events (SSE) packages

Last updated: January 26, 2025

Server-Sent Events (SSE) is a standard for enabling servers to push real-time updates to clients over HTTP. With SSE, the server sends a continuous stream of updates to the client once an initial request is made, and the connection remains open for as long as needed.

• Protocol: SSE uses HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2 and delivers events via a single long-lived connection.
• Event Format: The data is sent in a text-based event stream format (MIME type text/event-stream) where each event typically has event, data, and id fields.

Server-Sent Events (SSE) allow you to deliver real-time data updates from the server to the client without the need for continuous polling. SSE enables a unidirectional flow of data over a single, long-lived HTTP connection.

SSE is particularly suitable for real-time and incremental outputs from AI models. Here's how it applies to AI APIs:

1. Streaming Model Outputs: For tasks like text generation, summarization, or translation, AI models often generate outputs incrementally. SSE allows the client to receive these tokens as soon as they are produced, improving responsiveness.

2. Live Event Updates: Applications such as monitoring model inferences, real-time analytics, or activity tracking benefit from SSE's continuous streaming capabilities.

3. Reduced Latency for Interactive Applications: For chatbots or conversational agents powered by AI, SSE ensures the user receives responses with minimal delay.

4. Long-Lived Interactive Sessions: When interacting with large language models or continuous streams of AI-generated data, SSE simplifies maintaining a session between client and server.

Using SSE for AI outputs ensures a smoother and more dynamic user experience compared to traditional REST APIs.