Unfortunately, this approach will not work for clients using Internet Explorer (save for IE 10). WebSockets and EventStreams are fairly new, and not supported across all browsers (both for mobile and non-mobile).

This is why socket.io and its contemporaries have several layers of fallbacks, even going back to infinite iframe/JSONP polling.

I would suggest anyone implementing this take a look at faye-websocket. It was recently extracted from a production-quality project named Faye, which uses a pub-sub broadcast model based on bayeux. The websocket implementation has numerous fallbacks, and is well-tested. I'm using it in production currently.

https://github.com/faye/faye-websocket-ruby

Is there any information out there regarding streams / chunked responses within Rails? (I'm not talking about the new template stream facility, but generating arbitrary data)

I'm currently using enumerators assigned to response_body:

    self.status_code = 200
    self.response_body = Enumerator.new { |y| ... }

I'm hitting a number of problems though, e.g unicorn killing long-lived workers.

This is super cool.