Windbag

Notification Engine for Rails 3.1+

Windbag is an event notification system for Rails. Using Windbag with model observers, you can notify users about changes they're interested in over a variety of transports (WebSockets, email, SMS, Twitter, etc).

At present, the implementation of Transports is left up to you.

Windbag consists of Channels, Subscriptions and Notifications. A user subscribes to the Global Channel, his own Private Channel, and any number of other channels belonging to models in your application.

A Windbag notification is given a list of transport classes, which are triggered through an ActionMailer-like API upon creation.

Installation

Add windbag to your Gemfile:

gem 'windbag'

Then run bundle install, and migrate up:

rake windbag:install:migrations
rake db:migrate

In your User model, include Windbag::UserClass.

Users and Channels

When a User is created, he is automatically subscribed to two channels; Windbag.global_channel, and a private one created just for him. To sub/unsub other channels:

@user.subscribe(foo_channel).unsubscribe(bar_channel)

You can query @user.notifications for a list of notifications on all subscribed channels.

Creating Notifications

Windbag::Notification.create({
  :event => :rsvp
  :title => 'Someone has RSVP'd to the party!',
  :description => 'I will be there!'
  :url => party_url(party),
  :icon => 'party_hat.png',
  :sticky => false,
  :transports => [ Windbag::Transports::Mailer, Windbag::Transports::SMS, Windbag::Transports::Pusher ],
  :channel => party.windbag_channel
})

When the notification is created, the deliver method will be called on each transport class provided.

TODO

• User-selected transport preferences for specific events.