The Topic Is the Record: Real-Time Fan-Out Without a Broker, a Bridge, and a Cache

Real-time applications commonly use separate brokers, bridge consumers, databases, caches, and WebSocket gateways to distribute updates, persist events, hydrate late-arriving clients, and support browser connections, but this structure can create synchronization and operational complexity. An MQTT live-scoring demo built with Harper explores a consolidated alternative in which durable data writes also drive subscriptions: a Match record represents current convergent scoreboard state, while individual ScoreEvent rows preserve the full event history. Clients subscribing to a match immediately receive its current retained record and subsequent updates, removing the need for a separate cache, while MQTT publishes and HTTP requests share one ingestion resource that records events and updates aggregates in the same database process. Server-side timing data is stored with events and displayed to all viewers, emphasizing observable rather than animated performance, with lower latency attributed primarily to eliminating network hops between broker and storage. The approach also removes an external broker, bridge consumer, and separate WebSocket gateway for this use case, though it requires appropriate authentication before deployment and is not presented as a replacement for dedicated brokers in scenarios requiring large-scale device fan-in, QoS 2 delivery, broker-scale retained or last-will features, or multi-broker federation.

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