Rails with real time notifications architecture

Question

I need to add realtime notifications to my Rails app. Here are the different possible architectures I have found.

1. Rails + Socket.io + Redis: As suggested in this post, having the following architecture:

• Pro: Clean, no data is lost if Socket.io is down
• Con: Introduces several technologies (hardens maintainability)

2. Rails + Socket.io: Making Rails a Socket.io client, as this repo seems to do: https://github.com/lyondhill/socket.io-ruby-client

• Pro: Straightforward
• Con: Relying on a unpopular library

3. Ruby Faye: http://faye.jcoglan.com/ruby.html

• Pro: 100% Ruby
• Con: Since an external app is required, Socket.io is much more an industry standard than Faye right now.

4. ActionController::Live: http://edgeapi.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/Live.html

• Pro: The Rails in app way
• Con: Too immature

Questions:

• Is there a standard way (I'd have missed) to do that nowadays?
• Any thoughts on my comparison (hope this doesn't get closed)?

Answer 1

Take a look at eventmachine and websockets. There are also third party services such as Pusher and PubNub that will handle the websocket part for you via HTTP API.

https://github.com/igrigorik/em-websocket

Rails 5 will also be adding ActionCable which will do this in rails, but it's not out yet.

I would say the advantage to these approaches is that you don't need a separate node.js app. The services are very easy to use but not free.