563823 - [drain] evaluate concept of an app as data backbone

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Webtools Graveyard :: Elmo, defect, P3)

Description

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

I've been pondering back and forth how to engineer our data flow such that we can offer customizable feeds and notifications/mails throughout our apps.

One way is to have similar code in all apps, and then somehow get those together, the other way one could do this is to offer a single app that takes notifications and allow to filter and fork them.

The latter is what I'm code-naming "drain", i.e., the thing that gets shit out of the system.

The basic idea is to have a small model that apps can use to send notifications, and then have a common UI for folks to observe those through various media.

A rough draft for the notification would be:

author
when
generic model reference implementing http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/instances/#django.db.models.permalink
subject
message
properties, aka, many-to-many for key-value pairs

The filtering would mostly work on the key-value pairs.

Not sure if there's anything out there that can do feeds, mails (preferably including daily/weekly digests), in-page notifications.

Comment 1

[LegNeato]

This really sounds like you want a message broker! Take a look at HornetQ, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, etc. Pulse (http://pulse.mozilla.org) is running RabbitMQ currently. Once I get it solid I can create a vhost or an exchange for you to play around in and see if it suits your needs. I plan to have a super-simple notification webapp on top that listens to certain amqp messages and then does something useful with them based on user rules (like send email, a text message, hit a url, etc). That way, people won't need to code consumers/tools for the common notification cases but they can still drop down a level when they need customized logic/processing/integration.

Comment 3

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Resolving INCOMPLETE, we're not moving forward with this for now.

Once we do, we can re-open, and evaluate if the options from back then are still the options.