As part of my involvement in the UTS Programmers’ Society in 2024 and 2025 I’ve had the opportunity to work on several real-time web applications. These projects have given me hands-on experience with various technologies and architectures that enable real-time communication between clients and servers, inspiring my interest in WebRTC, WebSockets, and Server-Sent Events (SSE).

Technologies Explored

Throughout these projects, I’ve explored a range of technologies that facilitate real-time interactions:

  • tRPC: A library that facilitates type-safe communication between client and server applications (provided they’re both written in TypeScript). It allows for seamless integration of real-time features using WebSockets.
  • WebSockets: A protocol that enables two-way communication between a client and server over a single, long-lived connection. This is particularly useful for applications that require instant updates, such as the Programmers’ Society Club Voting System and FuzzJudge, a real-time competitive programming platform with live score updates.
  • Server-Sent Events (SSE): A technology that allows servers to push updates to clients over HTTP. This is useful for applications that need to send real-time updates without requiring full-duplex communication.
  • WebRTC: A technology that enables peer-to-peer communication between browsers. I’ve used WebRTC in projects like go2rtc-for-3dprinters to facilitate real-time video streaming from 3D printer cameras.
  • GraphQL Subscriptions: An extension of GraphQL that allows clients to subscribe to real-time updates from the server. This is useful for applications that require dynamic data updates and can be integrated with WebSockets for efficient communication.

Projects

The primary projects I’ve worked on that utilize these technologies include:

  • Club Voting System: A web application that allows members of the UTS Programmers’ Society to vote on club matters in real-time. The system uses tRPC and WebSockets to provide instant feedback on voting results.
  • FuzzJudge: A competitive programming platform that provides real-time score updates and feedback to participants. The application leverages GraphQL Subscriptions over WebSockets to deliver live score updates during contests.

Conclusion

Having to solve challenges involving long-lived connections, data synchronization, and real-time user interactions has been extremely interesting. By exploring some of the different technologies prevalent in real-time web applications, I’ve taught myself a lot about how to build responsive and interactive web applications that can handle real-time data efficiently as well as the trade-offs involved in choosing one technology over another based on the specific requirements of a project.