Any example of creating a time-aware layer (acrgis js api + ruby rails) using data from the server

Question

I have a data set of points. Each point has latitude, longitude, date and description sent from the server

I already have a graphic layer which is used for represening the points in a static way with some popups like this

          ...
          var graphic = new esri.Graphic(point, symbol);

          graphic.setInfoTemplate(new esri.InfoTemplate("", "Number: " + data.number));

          gLayer.add(graphic);
          ...

But Now I need to add a time-aware layer (a feature layer I believe) that allows me to show the data according to datetime information using a time slider, like here oil Filed. The only difference, I need to use the data sent from the server as json and I need to add popups to each point

I believe I need to add a featureLayer (MODE_SNAPSHOT) with a featureCollection as params that contains the data sent from server but I coulnd't figgure out how to do this (I'm a newbie in ArcGis, several hours only).

To be exact I'm not sure how to create that feature collection with latitude/longitude for each point and the most important thing: how to connect it with corresponding time information

I.e. I have sets of

{lat: xxx, long: yyy, datetime: yyyy-mm-dd, description: sometext }

sent from the server

Now I need to figure out how to pass the data to a featureLayer so it can be shown on a map with a time slider

Any example/help will be appreciated

thanks a lot