Sam Soffes

I forked a Rails plugin for sending push notifications with Rails awhile back for a client project. I've had a few people fork and add cool little fixes.

I've been wanting to play with GemCutter for awhile now. How hard could it be to release a Rails plugin as a gem, right? I sat down and rewatched a Railscast on how to build a gems with Jeweler and push it to GemCutter. It turns out, that was the easy part. GemCutter and Jeweler made it so easy to publish my plugin as gem.

So I know this is very backwards, but after it was on GemCutter I tested it my new gem. (Yes, many smacks on the hand for not writing test. I'm still learning all of that.) It turns out, that it was completely broken. I started to try and fix things, but ended up doing a complete rewrite.

Before, it would add the model in the plugin to your search path and then you would have to run a custom rake task in the plugin to add the table and migrate the database for the model. This always felt a little dirty, so I abstracted it all out. Now you can do:

class Device < ActiveRecord::Base
    acts_as_pushable
end

Pretty cool, right? Now sending is as easy as

d.send_notification :alert => "Hello world!"

(d being an instance of Device of course). You can read the full readme on GitHub. (Yes, another smack on the hand for no RDoc.)

Anyway, my code is probably very bad, as I'm pretty new to Ruby and Rails. I was very proud of myself for figuring it out. Check out the gem and let me know if you find it useful or stupid.