Using a locally-hosted database to send a realtime feed up to a remote Pubnub server to have Pubnub send data back down to your visitors seems unnecessarily complex.<p>There are plenty of standalone websocket (relay) servers if your language of choice doesn't implement Websockets well. Also if you're using nginx, you have built-in modules like pushstream that can handle it from the nginx side.<p>Considering the biggest selling point of RethinkDB is to provide realtime updates faster than other solutions, putting Pubnub is not just slowing the real-time system down but adding extra monetary cost.
While I love technical articles such as this it saddens me there is always a gap providing a working example. All code an no visuals mean most people won't try it. Please give us a URL to play with, or at minimum, animated gif to see this. I often find this with well written technical articles, open source projects, etc. Folks are excited to go over code detail but never show us the <i>demo</i>. You'll get more uptake since the hard work is already done!