What is a WebSocket, and how does it let a Flutter app maintain a genuinely persistent, continuously open connection with a server for genuine real time bidirectional communication?

A WebSocket establishes a genuinely persistent, continuously open connection between your Flutter app and a server, letting both sides freely send messages to each other at essentially any point without needing to repeatedly and wastefully establish a genuinely brand new separate connection for every single individual message, unlike a traditional HTTP request which genuinely closes its own connection immediately after receiving its own single response, and this particular persistent connection makes WebSockets genuinely well suited for real time features such as a live chat application, live sports score updates, or genuinely collaborative real time editing.

final channel = WebSocketChannel.connect(Uri.parse('wss://example.com/chat'));
channel.sink.add('Hello');
channel.stream.listen((message) => print('Received: $message'));