multiplayer / visitors interactions with Ruby on Rails?

Question

I want to have interactions between visitors on my site.

Imagine a chat room.

It basically involves getting the data from everyone and sending it to everyone, this can be done by ajax and what not but I wonder if there is something already there in the wild that would do the heavy lifting for me. I have to say that I got very lost once I start programming Ajax, dont even know how to make tests for it...

I have found the Q42multiplayer library that looks like what I want but they use C# as backend. There is something similar or any other multiplayer thingy I can get some idea or rip some code from (the whole thing will be opensource) for Ruby on Rails?

Answer 1

I wouldn't look at a full ruby/rails solution. That'd make it too heavy and slow.

Take a look at node.js, which allows you to create a javascript server.
And as an example with exactly what you need, you'll find this tutorial.

Answer 2

Such technology called COMET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29

In Rails here is one quite good solution that I have used few times: juggernauts http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/

It is really great simple solution.

Although here is more complex solutions such as nginx_http_push_module http://pushmodule.slact.net/ and others

Answer 3

I've been looking at doing something similar to allow users to tail the log output of long-running processes. I'm looking at doing it via RabbitMQ - the process can publish once and each viewer can subscribe to the queue. Javascript would poll the queue to look for new updates.