title: Juggernaut/Faye vs. Pusher for a Heroku hosted web service?
body: <p>If I understand correctly, Juggernaut is built on top of socket.io, and Faye competes with Juggernaut layer and socket.io layer combined. Recently Ryan Bates came up with a Faye wrapper called <a href="https://github.com/ryanb/private_pub" rel="noreferrer">PrivatePub</a> which makes it very easy to run Faye.</p>
  
  <p>But I already have a rails app that runs on Heroku, and all I want to do is build a simple chat feature on top of it.</p>
  
  <p>While researching I found lots of people use Pusher. It seems like pusher is well supported on Heroku so I'm thinking about using Pusher.</p>
  
  <p>Before I jump on, I just wanted to make sure I understand things correctly. Is Pusher like a Heroku for push requests? My option is to either host everything on Heroku (including Juggernaut or Faye module), or just host the static part of the site on Heroku and delegate push notification handling to pusher.</p>
  
  <p>From what I know, this feels like a more efficient approach since:
  1. If I use pusher, I don't have to jump through all the hoops in order to run juggernaut/faye modules on Heroku.
  2. The realtime traffic will be delegated to Pusher, which means I won't waste my Heroku server's resource.</p>
  
  <p>Now I'm just a beginner and may be wrong about lots of things, but please enlighten me. Are the two factors above correct? And is my understanding of Juggernaut/Faye/Pusher correct?</p>