Rails - syncing - Faye, Juggernaut, Cool.io, plain old eventmachine

Question

I have a need for syncing and have choice overload. It seems like the options available include: Faye, Juggernaut, Cool.io, plain old eventmachine

Any suggestions? What are the most popular, especially in the RoR community?

Thanks for any explanation around your suggestion.

Answer 1

I just implemented Juggernaut in one of my apps and I think it's awesome. It uses Redis for its pub/sub features and Socket.IO to maximise browser/mobile support.

Here's a discussion comparing it with Faye. I don't believe Faye uses Socket.IO which is one of the reasons I chose Juggernaut. I also liked the simplicity of Juggernaut as it matched my particular use case.

Juggernaut uses Node.js for its server making it easily scalable and provides a Ruby gem that makes publishing messages onto Redis a piece of cake.

Here's a quick post on setting it up on Ubuntu 10.04.

You could also look at Pusher which is a service that does it all for you.

Answer 2

I've used http://socket.io/ in a pilot project for continuously updating web clients (like in chat application). The ruby server implementation is here: https://github.com/markjeee/Socket.IO-rack. It is somewhat 'raw' but works OK. It is based on Thin, Rack and EventMachine and requires redis for operation.

The big advantage is the number of available protocols so even if you have an old browser it should just work. I haven't done any benchmarks but based on ingredients it should be fast enough.