How to make REST calls that work in both browsers and Node?

[billba]

Prague is meant to work both in browsers and in Node apps. But browsers and Node have very different runtimes. Browsers have XmlHttpRequest and (increasingly) fetch. Node has HTTP.

Of course, per the "bring your own everything" philosophy of Prague, developers can use whatever they want in coding their bots. But at the very least our LUIS library will have to make some kind of call, and I can imagine adding libraries for other services e.g. cognitive services, Azure Search.

Also it would be nice to make it easy for them to build isomorphic (runs on either browser or server) bots out of the box, where by "out of there box" I mean "in the appropriate recipes".

At the moment we use RxJS' built-in get/post/etc. but they all sit on top of XHR. There are Node polyfills for XHR, but they are not comprehensive. And I don't think our recipes should require that developers use Observables for anything. It's great that they're available for those who want them, but let's keep the learning curve as shallow as possible.

My inclination is to use fetch and add a fetch polyfill for node applications. Opinions?

[billba]

As an update I have gone with the fetch route for now but I'll leave this issue open for a while in the hopes of gathering other options.

[billba]

Not relevant to latesr version.