I am building a real-time application ,and I am using private_pub gem based on fayejs but it doesn't have a lot of features like pusher ex. presence channels which I can fetch online users for me pusher is expensive for my application I read some posts about socket.io but I didn't know how to implement it with rails and also if I need to learn node.js before using it hope any one could help me
I do not know why exactly it is expensive for your application but I have never found any problem.
Please refer this link.
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/ruby/how-to-use-faye-as-a-real-time-push-server-in-rails/