# Pingbacker

This package contains two useful tools for developers working with web services 
that provide HTTP notifications when certain events occur. For 
example, a video encoding service that notifies you when the transcoding 
process is complete and the output files delivered.

When working with such services in a 'local' or 'development' mode, generally 
you are working on a laptop or some commuter not setup with a public HTTP 
interface. Such an interface could be configured, but it can require complex 
network configuration on your LAN as well as your computer.

Enter Pingbacker. Pingbacker is primarily two components:

* a Sinatra application which serves to receive notifications from web services 
  and save their attributes so that clients can fetch them and replay them locally
* a PingbackReplayer client which is meant to run in a loop, polling the 
  Pingbacker service for new pingbacks to replay locally
  
The Sinatra application should be in a state one could easily deploy to Heroku 
or similar.

The PingbackReplayer usage is shown in pingback_replayer.rb.

# Ackknowledgements

The work on this app originally started at HD Cloud, a video conversion provider. 
That work was resurrected and continued(including creation of the 
PingbackReplayer and adding the necessary interfaces to the Pingbacker app 
for that to work) to support development of the Drop.io Rich Media Backbone 
which integrates with several third party service providers when providing 
conversion services.

# Contributors

* Seth Thomas Rasmussen [sethrasmussen@gmail.com]
* Matt Vermaak