Implementing Notifications in Rails

Question

In my application, I want to notify a user, when he/she is mentioned in a comment or a post.
The user handle is @user_name, similar to Facebook

Answer 1

There is no single recommended approach for this. At an uber level, you may want to look at 'Comet programming', Polling and WebSockets [HTML5] and then choose the right combination. There are a couple of great implementations to manage push notifications in rails. Orbited, Juggernaut, PusherApp, Faye etc. You'll have to dig deep to figure out which of 'em use web-sockets & and fall-back to flash option to handle full support.

Faye gives a Node.js configuration also, but I am not sure about others.

Tentatively the steps would look something like:

1. Save the content - queue it to parser

2. Parse the content to find out involved users - Use Nokogiri or equivalent.

3. Comet/Poll it to involved users in current_session as a separate process if you're looking at Twitter like approach.

4. //Do other things with Post record

5. Push notifications to involved users and destroy() when they come online later.

   Hope that gives some direction.