Meta Bates

The latest version of Apple Push Notifications on Rails (APN on Rails) has been released. This release brings a few bug fixes, a new migration, and Feedback processing.

Installing/upgrading is easy:

$ sudo gem install apn_on_rails
$ ruby script/generate apn_migrations
$ rake db:migrate


It’s important to always run the migrations generator after each update to get the latest database schema needed for the the gem.

To use the new Feedback integration you have to first make sure that you update the new last_registered_at column when your iPhone application calls home. This column is checked against the timestamp Apple returns with the device token. If the last_registered_at is older than Apple’s date then the device is deleted, otherwise the Feedback is ignored.

To get and process the list of devices from Apple’s Feedback service just run the following Rake task:

$ rake apn:feedback:process

Enjoy!

The other night I submitted a new iPhone application to the Apple Store. The app, which I’ll speak about when, and if it gets approved, uses the new Apple Push Notification service available in iPhone OS 3.0. On the server side I have a Rails application that I am using to send the notifications to Apple. The problem I ran into was how.

Enter the APN on Rails gem. While searching I found one plugin for Rails that mostly worked for me, Sam Soffes’ apple_push_notification plugin. It was a great place to start, but I found that there were things that didn’t suite me. For starters, not having any tests is always a big turn off for me when it comes to any code. I also didn’t like that you didn’t need to save a notification in order to send it. That means you don’t have a record of what was sent and when. I also wanted to have devices stored separately from the notification. Finally, I wanted to be able to easily configure the plugin. Sam’s was using constants that would need to be changed when it hit production.

So, with all that said and done I took Sam’s great work, ripped it apart, and put it back together again, this time in gem form instead of a plugin, and here it is.

There are a few migrations, a few models, and a few Rake tasks, but here is the basic idea of how it works:

To get a better understanding of exactly how it works, and what it does, I highly recommend reading the RDOC.

There are a few things I still would like to add, for example, a controller to do CRUD for devices so iPhones can register with the Rails app. I’d also like to add a task that talks to Apple and finds out which devices are no longer accepting messages so they can be removed.

If you’d like to contribute, please feel free and for the project on GitHub:
http://github.com/markbates/apn_on_rails/tree

Again, a special thanks to Fabien Penso and Sam Soffes for their initial work on this project.