Relatedly, Mattt Thompson of Gowalla/Heroku/Panic/AFNetworking fame proposed Rocket, a technique that pairs JSON Patch and Server-Sent Events to aid in the construction of realtime apps via REST services. The proposal has seemingly been abandon, which is unfortunate as the formalization of handling was interesting, even if one implemented it on top of a different transport layer like Web Sockets or a push notification service.

http://rocket.github.io/