[primitivesuave]

My solution so far has been to write my own Node server that listens to a particular branch for requests, and use the rules to enforce that a user can only write to /request/<user-id>. When making a request, a user writes data to their user ID's request branch, and listen for changes made by the server to their request. This has worked out great, but the Java server is now a point-of-failure. It would be great to get some information on how this would be an improvement over my current setup.

[drTriumph]

The biggest advantage would be that you can have multiple server processes listening for requests on the same path and know that only one will be processing it at any point in time. That way your process is no longer a single point if failure.