Introducing Socktalk
While I was working at Brewster last summer, I worked with socktalk, a lightweight socket.io proxy by John Crepezzi. (John worked at Brewster and also maintains a fantastic code blog: See John Code.)
Socktalk works by holding open socket connections to clients and accepting HTTP requests from a server. It then forwards the intended message—e.g. a push notification—to the client. This means that you can execute a server push just by speaking HTTP with socktalk.
Brewster is very in to documenting and open-sourcing their projects, and I have written and recorded a screencast introducing socktalk. During the screencast, I build a simple and impractical "counter" application, which publicly displays page hits since the last application launch. It updates the count via a socktalk-proxied server push from a Ruby on Rails application.