Call Socket.io from Rail Active:Record callback or observer

The good folks at LayerVault posted a easy way to add 'real-time' features on existing Ruby application without resorting to client side MCV or rewrite the entire app in Node.js, a while back. Their post show that you can update to all clients whenever your rails Models are updated [Reference 1] through delay_job & Active:Record Observer:

  class FileObserver < ActiveRecord::Observer
      observer :lv_file

    def after_commit(record)
      record.delay.report_updated
    end
  end

and 

  class LVFile < ActiveRecord::Base
     def report_updated
        Messenger.publish_message('file_updated', "file/#{self.id}")
     end
  end

[Reference 1] http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/31462727280/rails-in-realtime-part-2

Connect to socket.io server from client side javascript is easy. however I'm at lost how to implement Messenger.publish_message('file_updated', "file/#{self.id}") on rails server side. In the post they do mentioned that

The report_updated method makes a class method call to a separate Messenger class (our Socket.IO interface on the web app side) and reports that a file has changed to the appropriate room.

But I'm still not very sure how to implement Messager class in Rails so that Active:Record Observer will be able to connect to my socket.io server and send updates.

[PS] A conversation on HN indicates that they utilized this gem

The gem's wiki even included a brief demo:

 require 'SocketIO'

   client = SocketIO.connect("http://localhost", sync: true) do
      before_start do
        on_message {|message| puts message}
        on_disconnect {puts "I GOT A DISCONNECT"}
      end

      after_start do
        emit("loadLogs", "/var/www/rails_app/log/production.log")
      end
   end

    puts "socket still running"
   loop do
     sleep 10
     puts 'zzz'
   end

The Messenger class doesn't have much to it. All you need is to create the connection, fire off the message and then wrap things up. This is the entirety of our messenger.rb:

require 'socketio-client'

class Messenger
  def self.send_message!(name, args)
    begin
      SocketIO.connect(MESSENGER_SOCKETIO_ADDRESS, sync: true) do
        after_start do
          emit(name, args)
          disconnect
        end
      end
    rescue
    end
  end
end