Show HN: A Node.js open source library to send transactional notifications | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A Node.js open source library to send transactional notifications

github.com

84 pointsbdav2417 comments

We just wrote something similar, using RabbitMQ (https://github.com/richthegeek/beatrix) as the main manager for things.

Seems like retries and delays are not part of this, but I guess they are added easily enough to the individual queue system used. Any desire to build them into it? Retries should be easy enough if you're happy to modify the bodies, although delays are not so easy (we're using the 'delayed message exchange' plugin for Rabbit to do this currently).

Maybe some built-in/example queue integrations (Rabbit, Redis, etc)?

Also, it's not super clear to me how you might host the SMS/Push/email/whatever provider on a different process/system to the publisher?

But it looks lovely and clean! Major props!

Very nice, queue integration examples are one of my next steps. I didn't include the queue inside the lib to give the choice to users, but I intended to write a few ones. Would you want code one? About the consumer, it's running on the same instance than the producer for more simplicity (but you can always run instances that only do consumer job).

What is a "transactional" notification? This doesn't seem to be explained anywhere in the README.

A notification that is sent based on some trigger. I think the terminology comes from email marketing https://sendgrid.com/blog/marketing-email-vs-transactional-e...

That's what I assumed, but it would be nice if that were made explicit.

Thanks for the feedback. I added the word "transactional" to say that we can't send batches with the lib. Anyway it's not a hard limitation because you can always make a loop.

I would really suggest clarifying what you mean somewhere then because I don't think anyone would interpret it that way.

Shameless plug here.. I've been working on a service that kinda solves a similar problem, called Postways [1].

Even though Postways also provides a unified API for sending email, SMS and mobile push, the main focus of Postways is actually on managing the message templates. When you work with a team where not everyone is a developer, updating the actual message text can be a major problem, especially when the message text is in source code or various different places.

[1] https://www.postways.com

from the docs this looks like a really practical library. The testing and dev tools look great.

whats the backstory for this library?

Hi hitgeek, thanks for your comment. The backstory is quite simple, the initial plan was to make a saas api service, but we don't like cold calling so much, so it ended up as an open source project :)

The logo looks like a recoloured Telegram logo [0]. I'd recommend you change it before this gets big to avoid trademark shenanigans.

[0]: https://telegram.org

Which looks like http://fontawesome.io/icon/paper-plane/ I don't think our logo harms them in any way.

Are there any well-tested Node.js libraries to do scheduling alongside something this? E.g., if I wanted to send the notifications once a week, etc.

I've used https://github.com/kelektiv/node-cron in the past, which could be run in the same process as the web app or in its own process. Works really well for recurring jobs.

Yes thanks, using something like node-cron can resolve your problem.

fallback + round-robin : <3 Awesome idea. fallback : could be very usefull if you main provider is down round-robin : send more free emails using multiple providers

ahh this looks awesome! will try it out. I love the fact that you can use any queue with this <3

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