I'd like to implement a scalable chatroom in rails using AJAX. I know from research that the only scalability happens with a server-side push.
My two questions are:
1) In a reasonably efficient chat server, at what point does polling become prohibitive? 2) I really don't want to use Juggernaut. I don't know much about how comet works. I guess I'm wondering if this would be horribly difficult for me to build using Javascript (to create a client side server/poller) and another language (to provide efficient polling for clients behind a firewall, and an integration into the CGI). and 3) (yes, out of 2), whether I'm even going about it the right way?
The simplest answer I could hope for is a quantified "yes, you put 5 lines of Javascript into the client and 20 lines of ruby into a CGI script, and call it a day".