I think you can view pusher as being the quick and easy way to add chat and realtime. I would look into Juggernaut which is basically a ruby wrapper for socket.

I think you can view pusher as being the quick and easy way to add chat and realtime. I would look into Juggernaut which is basically a ruby wrapper for socket.io which runs on node.js and gives you most of the same functionality that you get with pusher, except that you run the server yourself of course.