slanger

I have come across Slanger[1] while researching for a good websocket server and it worked well for us. It's basically an open source version of Pusher backend. You may be interested in their code. [1] https://github.com/stevegraham/slanger

There a few (including this) OSS Pusher clones available if you prefer other languages: Ruby - Slanger* (https://github.com/stevegraham/slanger) Java/Play - PushPlay (https://github.com/danbeaulieu/PushPlay) *Disclosure: I am one of the authors of Slanger.

Actually not everything in Node is non-blocking. IO is largely non-blocking by but there is also blocking IO in Node too (synchronous file system functions). Not to mention you definitely will block by doing something computationally intensive in a single tick of the reactor loop. Have you ever written a non-trivial "real time" app in Ruby? I have (https://github.com/stevegraham/slanger). I think Ruby is actually very well suited to event driven apps. Eventmachine is a very mature library providing asynchronous I/O based on the same pattern as Node. Ruby also has fibers as a native language feature, allowing you to write asynchronous code that looks synchronous, i.e. no nested callback hell, and consequently this makes it a lot easier to write tests for. Comparing Node to Rails is also absolute nonsense. Rails is a web framework and Node

For what its worth: if you want to have your own pusher, you can use Slanger. https://github.com/stevegraham/slanger It works with most (if not all) pusher libs and is rather convenient (except the "run on your own infrastructure" part).

Pusher-like service implementations are very easy, I know, I've built one[1] and there are others[2]! If you have any questions, feel free to email me. [1] https://github.com/danbeaulieu/PushPlay [2] https://github.com/stevegraham/slanger

There's also this ruby implementation that plays nice with all the pusher libs https://github.com/stevegraham/slanger

This article is using a polling technique, I suggest everyone check out Pusher[1] or the open source equivalent Slanger[2] that use websockets to allow you to push these updates from your server. [1] http://www.pusher.com/ [2] https://github.com/stevegraham/slanger (ps: not affiliated with either of those, they're just awesome pieces of technology that I see as the future of the web)