I would use Sinatra's "stream" feature coupled with EventSource on the client side. Leaves IE out, though.
Here's some mostly functional server side code pulled from https://github.com/redis/redis-rb/blob/master/examples/pubsub.rb (another option is https://github.com/pietern/hiredis-rb):
get '/the_stream', provides: 'text/event-stream' do
stream :keep_open do |out|
redis = Redis.new
redis.subscribe(:channel1, :channel2) do |on|
on.message do |channel, msg|
out << "data: #{msg}\n\n" # This is an EventSource message
end
end
end
end
Client side. Most modern browsers support EventSource, except IE:
var stream = new EventSource('/the_stream');
stream.onmessage = function(e) {
alert("I just got this from the server: " + e.data);
}