from Hacker News

Why Rails 4 Live Streaming is a Big Deal

by ninh on 8/3/12, 3:01 PM with 57 comments

  • by amix on 8/3/12, 3:19 PM

    Rails is turning into a framework that includes everything, including the kitchen sink. Personally, I prefer to use the best tool for the job and node.js seems to be a much saner choice when doing realtime communication, since everything in node.js is non-blocking. There are so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot if you develop large realtime systems in Ruby (or any other language that includes a lot of blocking libraries).
  • by alexyoung on 8/3/12, 3:23 PM

    "Can Rails compete with Node.js?"

    For the perplexed: Node isn't a web framework.

  • by bascule on 8/3/12, 4:33 PM

    "Cons: If a thread crashes, the entire process goes down."

    I wrote this thing called Celluloid and I can assure you this isn't true. Ruby has "abort_on_exception" for threads, but the default is most assuredly false.

    "Good luck debugging concurrency bugs."

    Good luck debugging concurrency bugs in a callback-driven system!

  • by edwinnathaniel on 8/3/12, 4:07 PM

    It's becoming more like... GASP JavaEE GASP
  • by aoe on 8/3/12, 4:16 PM

    So these changes won't be available in the free version of Phusion Passenger 4?
  • by parfe on 8/3/12, 3:13 PM

    >Several days ago Rails introduced Live Streaming: the ability to send partial responses to the client immediately.

    Would this be analogous to what PHP does if you being writing a response without output buffering?

  • by why-el on 8/3/12, 3:24 PM

    Pardon the ignorance, but can't this be achieved by simple Ajax requests provided by any of the js frameworks? How is this better?
  • by sergiotapia on 8/3/12, 3:46 PM

    Is this any different than what SignalR provides for ASP.Net Web Applications?