title: Server-side Push in Rails
body: <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>My two questions are:</p>
  
  <p>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?</p>
  
  <p>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".</p>