The answer depends on your use case. For the most part though I've found that you can implement everything you need with sockets. As long as you are only trying to access your server with clients who can support sockets. Also, scale can be an issue when you're using only sockets. Here are some examples of how you could use just sockets.
Server side:
socket.on('getUsers', () => {
// Get users from db or data model (save as user_list).
socket.emit('users', user_list );
})
socket.on('createUser', (user_info) => {
// Create user in db or data model (save created user as user_data).
io.sockets.emit('newUser', user_data);
})
Client side:
socket.on('newUser', () => {
// Get users from db or data model (save as user_list).
socket.emit('getUsers');
})
socket.on('users', (users) => {
// Do something with users
})
This uses socket.io for node. I'm not sure what your exact scenario is but this would work for that case. If you need to include REST endpoints that would be fine too.
