I don't know about Django but rails has the idea of "live controllers". Sure it uses polling but didn't you watch DHH's railsconf presentation? They have 5-6 w

I don't know about Django but rails has the idea of "live controllers". Sure it uses polling but didn't you watch DHH's railsconf presentation? They have 5-6 workers and a single redis server which sustains 100k+ reqs per minute. It also only took DHH 4 hours to convert the entire basecamp project to be live (ie. live updating comments as it comes in). Sure it's not really live since the polling is only happening every few seconds but who cares? Even for most chat systems it's completely reasonable to do polling, most certainly if it's 1:1 chat. Also look at Disqus. They are mostly all django, they even use postgres with a schema. Their "real time comment system pusher" was written in Go in a week with almost no prior knowledge to Go. I see nothing wrong with that and IMO it's exactly what we should be doing. Use Django/Rails for the bulk of your app, CRUD interfaces, etc. and then create optimized services with Go or some other language for real-time aspects. [*] Everything I mentioned is documented online through talks, engineering blogs, etc..