I love a good challenge! This is why I become fullstack developer, we never get the simple tasks 😠, there's always a catch: sometime there is technology/hardware limitation, sometime security demands, or more than often plain old tight deadlines.
This post is based on such a solution, as part of my job I needed to devise a quick POC for a job dispatcher where there were some technology limitation: the clients could connect to the server only within a browser embedded within another external application, the browser in question was of course IE 11 and we had no control on the external application. The only resource given to the task was my time, and not much of it...
The solution I found is based on the well known socket.io, it is mature and robust server-client socket communication library, it was quick to setup and had no issues with the limitation I had. I used an existing express server and extend it