Grocer - New Gem for Sending Apple Push Notifications in Ruby | Hacker News Reader

Grocer - New Gem for Sending Apple Push Notifications in Ruby

github.com

39 pointsvanstee18 comments

Awesome! This is great.

I'm also working on an APNS gem called Lead Zeppelin, which is similar in design, but adds a few things like a pool of connections (read: concurrent on threaded systems like JRuby and Rubinius): https://github.com/geoloqi/lead_zeppelin

There is some high quality code here, this is a great start. I think the error handling needs to be drilled down a bit, and there needs to be more logging. I'm definitely going to borrow some components of this.. the apns test server is really awesome! I'm happy that APNS support is improving in the Ruby community.

Great suggestions. It would be awesome if you contributed it to grocer as well :P. It's still in active development though so you may find some of these enhancements in grocer at some point in the near future. Thanks man!

No problem, I would love to contribute! My account is kyledrake on Github.

Right now I'm experimenting with socket keepalive, which I think may be important to keeping socket connections open (per some discussion I found from an Apple dev). If my tests go well I'll send a pull request later tonight!

The one thing I haven't figured out yet is how to stop messages from being dropped after feedback comes in. It has a tendency to silently fail to send messages. My current solution is to check for errors before a write, and do a IO.select on the socket to wait for a read for an arbitrary amount of time. You might want to look at some of the weird stuff I had to do in here.. it's a problem I'd like to figure out how to deal with: https://github.com/geoloqi/lead_zeppelin/blob/master/lib/lea...

Sweet. Now accepting pull requests :)

Interesting. We haven't hit that issue yet.

Hmmm. We also haven't had any issues with feedback affecting our outgoing messages. Yeah we just check for messages from the feedback socket after sending a notification (as Apple's guide recommends) but we're not doing anything fancy like waiting for a response. Sounds cool though.

I want to remove the IO.select because it slows things down unfortunately. I noticed you are using enhanced push, but also opening a feedback socket separately. I was under the impression that you were supposed to read feedback in-line with the enhanced protocol, but I may have gotten this wrong. Are you using the enhanced protocol -and- listening to the feedback socket? This is interesting, and may solve a problem I'm having, so I wanted to get your thoughts.

Couldn't find that in the guide (reading feedback from the same socket). I might have missed it though.

And yep. We're using the enhanced protocol while opening another connection to the feedback service. I just followed this section of the docs.

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Networ...

Where do you call the feedback socket after sending a notification in the code? Is this something you do on your application's end? Sorry, last question I promise. Pull requests coming soon!

Oh sorry. Yeah we do this in our app (not automatically in the gem).

Hey, you do know that Apple requires developers to maintain persistent connections to their servers, right?

Checkout https://github.com/jnak/apnmachine Feature list: - persistent connection to APN Servers (as Apple recommends) - real-time notifications (no regular polling a la Resque) - super easy to use in Ruby and any languages (as easy as enqueuing a serialized JSON hash in Redis) - persist and queue messages when server is down - horizontal scalability and out-of-the-box load-balancing - fast daemons

Nice! We keep a single connection open using the standalone gem.

But yeah you're right it would be an issue if you were connecting to Apple's servers in a resque worker for example, since the socket would be opened in a new child for each job. I bet you could get around this though by opening a socket in the parent and using it in each child process. Reconnecting might be a little trickier though.

apnmachine looks pretty sweet. I'll have to check it out if I need something like that in the future.

Don't know the standalone gem, I'll have to check that out. I'll be glad to get some feedback on apnmachine :)

> the standalone gem

@vanstee is referring the Grocer being a RubyGem and not needing other dependencies like Resque.

This was exactly my thought, and having followed the link I'm not clear how (or even whether) this gem solves it.

I currently use the Python/Twisted-based https://github.com/samuraisam/pyapns in production. It looks a bit abandoned, but it has a Ruby client and has been rock-solid for me.

Or, if you use Urban Airship; it's literally like five lines of code with HTTParty to send a push notification.

Of course, your needs may vary, but UA scales well and is essentially free to start with.

I was just looking at options for push notifications in ruby. I found a gem called apn_on_rails (https://github.com/PRX/apn_on_rails) which sort of worked. But I didn't know how to keep persistent connections and was afraid of accidentally spamming Apple's servers. I thought about outsource the problem to Urban Airship, but unfortunately their free service only works for 45 days then costs hundreds of dollars a month. Grocer looks really interesting and I'd definitely want to try it out.

You scared me there for a minute. I thought they'd dropped their free plan. Turns out it still exists: https://go.urbanairship.com/accounts/register/

There's another gem you should take a look at, too, called 'rapns'. The maintainer is pretty active with fixes and it maintains persistent connections with a daemon.

Oh yeah I've heard great things about Urban Airship. Also I noticed a new heroku add-on that looks pretty nifty as well.

https://addons.heroku.com/boxcar

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