The Wind in the Willows and WebSockets

Persistent connections for riverbanks, dashboards, and excitable amphibians

Kenneth Grahame · 19 July 2026

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as maintaining a sensible heartbeat interval.

This measured treatment of real-time web architecture follows the river from polling to server-sent events to WebSockets, pausing to consider connection lifecycles, message ordering, reconnection, scaling, and the inadvisability of allowing Toad to broadcast directly from production. It is a book for engineers who know that immediacy is a feature, not an excuse to abandon protocols.

Contents

1. Messing About with Long Polling
2. Toad Hall Opens a Persistent Connection
3. Badger Explains Backpressure
4. Panic at the Load Balancer

Published by Austenpunk, the distinguished imprint for engineers who believe that every production incident would be improved by a stronger sense of narrative irony.

This essential volume combines literary feeling, technical anxiety, and just enough documentation to suggest that somebody once understood the system.