Ruby gem Stream API like twitter

Question

Is there any gem for ruby (i want to use it in a rails app) that does somethink like Twitter Stream API. Keep the http conection opened and send information in real time based in a query or events.

Answer 1

You need:

• a server that speaks HTTP in order to be able to understand queries and respond valid HTTP to the client
• an asynchronous system that will push updates in the connection established with the client when there's new data available.

Then thin is an options you might consider, it has a builtin http parser for the first requirement, and eventmachine for the second.

Have a look at this example (run it with thin --rackup async_tailer.ru start). It is tailing asynchronously the /var/log/syslog through a open http connection. You can adapt this example to send data from other asynchronous sources from which you would like data to come.

Answer 2

I think twitter-stream should do what you want.