> LOL at the idea that every Rails programmer will be switching to Clojure or Elixir!
I meant those as examples based on what I see around me. That's exactly my agony, I don't know what is next and, if I did, I would be learning it already. At this point, I just feel it is not Rails.
> Re. EventMachine: As I understood DHH's speech, the idea is that ActionCable abstracts all the messiness around EventMachine, Websockets, Rack and threads
If you are using Event Machine you can't abstract away from it. You need to do all I/O using Event Machine aware mechanisms. You can get rid of callbacks by using fibers but you are still required to use an API specific to Event Machine. For example, you can't use File.read to read a file as that will block your event loop.
Nginx HTTP Push Module seems to much better solution than EventMachine. So Nginx keeps opened sockets and a Rails app sends messages via ordinary HTTP.
I'm also wary of handling websockets from Ruby, which is demonstrably ill suited for any kind of high concurrency networking (been there, got the t-shirt).
Since most people already run nginx in their stack anyway I don't see the advantage of sticking with a Ruby-based solution that is almost guaranteed to be inferior on every metric.
You are confusing the real need to use EM aware mechanisms with a not-real inability to use abstractions over EM itself. Those are two different issues.
I meant those as examples based on what I see around me. That's exactly my agony, I don't know what is next and, if I did, I would be learning it already. At this point, I just feel it is not Rails.
> Re. EventMachine: As I understood DHH's speech, the idea is that ActionCable abstracts all the messiness around EventMachine, Websockets, Rack and threads
If you are using Event Machine you can't abstract away from it. You need to do all I/O using Event Machine aware mechanisms. You can get rid of callbacks by using fibers but you are still required to use an API specific to Event Machine. For example, you can't use File.read to read a file as that will block your event loop.