We're rolling our own dirt-simple real-time framework at Poll Ev. If you want to check out the source-code, its available at https://github.com/polleverywhere/p

We're rolling our own dirt-simple real-time framework at Poll Ev. If you want to check out the source-code, its available at https://github.com/polleverywhere/push/tree/backends https://github.com/polleverywhere/push/tree/backends. We're about a week away from dropping this branch into our production environment and moving down a path towards "Streaming REST" that plays really nicely with Backbone.js. The ultimate idea is that you drop the "push" middleware into your rack-up file, setup callbacks on your server-side data models (ActiveRecord) that drop JSON representations of itself on to MQ channels that map out to RESTful URLs. A client using Backbone that wants to keep up-to-date on the resource subscribes to stream.polleverywhere.com/the/path/to/the/resource.json and boom! Everything just works.