Oops... page not available!

Building Streaming REST APIs with Ruby

by Jerry Cheung on May 24, 2012

Twitter popularized the term "firehose API", to mean a realtime stream of data sent through a persistent connection. But even if you're not a realtime service, streaming APIs are great for pushing data from the backend to clients. They reduce resource usage because the server can decide when it's a good time to send a incremental chunk of data. They can also improve the responsiveness of your user experience. The same HTTP API can be reused to power multiple different apps. For example, you could write your web frontend with a Javascript frameworks like [Backbone.js](http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/), but reuse the same API to power a native iOS application. Follow the jump to read about how streaming APIs work, and how you can write one with [Rack::Stream](https://github.com/intridea/rack-stream). Continue reading