I am building a web application that involves user notifications, follows, forum feeds, likes and more.
I want to send users live notifcations, like if someone sent them a follow request or a message.
I also would like to see the like buttons and forum replies update in realtime without the users having to navigate from or refresh the page.
I thought about polling the server, but I don't think this is a good idea.
I am thinking websockets may be a solution, but I could be wrong. I was under the impression that websockets do not handle authentification very well.
Ia there a free solution out there I can use to implement these features? How would I go about this?