I am using rails for more than 2 years now,,now I am building a real time application which is simple social network ,using private_pub gem for commenting and notifications ,I read about nodejs and I am learning it for the 3rd week now ,nodejs is really amazing platform ,,but I want to know how I can integrate nodejs and socket.io with my rails app for providing online/offline feature and also for chatting .
You can check this post, it's a tutorial for integrating Rails + node.js + socket.io + redis
http://liamkaufman.com/blog/2013/02/27/adding-real-time-to-a-restful-rails-app/