I started down this path a month or two ago and you're right - it's actually quite a big job. I've been working on a real time system for rails / ember that moves all data over a websocket and allows subscribing to updates, however it has been very hard to get working with ember-data. I've currently have it running with my own (terrible) data layer but I would really like to get it running with ember-data again before I get it up on github.