I'm looking to develop an app that needs to monitor the Bitcoin network in real time. I'm already able to parse the blockchain into a database, but I'm wondering what the best way to keep the database up to date in real time is?

bitcoind doesn't seem to have a JSON-RPC API for getting streams of new transactions or blocks, does it? I suppose I could monitor the debug.log but that feels hacky.

Is there a better client/library for this purpose? What does blockchain.info do, for example?