Why Rails 4 Live Streaming is a Big Deal

Rails is turning into a framework that includes everything, including the kitchen sink. Personally, I prefer to use the best tool for the job and node.js seems to be a much saner choice when doing realtime communication, since everything in node.js is non-blocking. There are so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot if you develop large realtime systems in Ruby (or any other language that includes a lot of blocking libraries).

"Can Rails compete with Node.js?"<p>For the perplexed: Node isn't a web framework.

"Cons: If a thread crashes, the entire process goes down."<p>I wrote this thing called Celluloid and I can assure you this isn't true. Ruby has "abort_on_exception" for threads, but the default is most assuredly false.<p>"Good luck debugging concurrency bugs."<p>Good luck debugging concurrency bugs in a callback-driven system!

It's becoming more like... <i>GASP</i> JavaEE <i>GASP</i>

So these changes won't be available in the free version of Phusion Passenger 4?

&#62;<i>Several days ago Rails introduced Live Streaming: the ability to send partial responses to the client immediately.</i><p>Would this be analogous to what PHP does if you being writing a response without output buffering?

Pardon the ignorance, but can't this be achieved by simple Ajax requests provided by any of the js frameworks? How is this better?

Is this any different than what SignalR provides for ASP.Net Web Applications?