I strongly recommend against implementing your own WS layer and instead, let http://pusherapp.com/ http://pusherapp.com/ do the heavy lifting — they are amazing

I strongly recommend against implementing your own WS layer and instead, let http://pusherapp.com/ http://pusherapp.com/ do the heavy lifting — they are amazing. At BuzzData, we have dozens of resque workers sending messages into Pusher and we've moved beyond using it for messages and notifications to using it for UI functionality like our file upload progress widget.