[Pusher] Rewrite the whole thing

[tobyzerner]

From @tobscure on August 27, 2015 13:51

I threw the Pusher extension together in a night without much thought, because I wanted to get the beta out the door :P

While it does the basics OK (update the discussion list, push new posts, and update the unread notifications count), it could be way better. And it's a mess and basically needs to be rewritten. Anyway, here's how I think it should be improved:

• Extract a lot of the code into core, so that the extension is effectively telling core "hey I just found out about this new post in this discussion – whatchu gunna do about it?" and then core shows the "1 updated discussions" button or updates the post stream or whatever. This will allow us to write other extensions for different push services without duplicating/having inconsistent implementations.
• Make it push more information about the discussion that was updated, so that we can check whether we already have the most up-to-date information, and don't have to extend addDiscussion.
• Don't say there are updated discussions if they are in a hidden tag
• Push to a user whenever they read notifications, so that the number of unread notifications stays in sync between browser windows.
• Push for discussion events (e.g. discussion renaming)
• Push for post likes
• Show a little bubble every time a notification is received (again, this is something that would probably belong in core)
• Push user online status (via presence channels? idk)

What needs to be done:

• Working out a plan of attack for that first bullet point is the most important thing.
• Reimplement the current basic features in a cleaner way.
• Create issues for the additional features.

Copied from original issue: flarum/pusher#1

[franzliedke]

Also, the "new updates" notification in the discussion list should be fixed to the top.

[luceos]

It would be amazing if the core would support a generic notification method and you can add new broadcasting systems to it. By default you would add pusher that would receive Events and handles them. But you could also think of e-mail, slack, hipchat; see for instance notifymehq.

[franzliedke]

Hmm, well, since we already have an event system, it's somewhat easy to do it for any notification provider anyway. But yeah, there might be value in abstracting away external services like that... could very well be done by an extension, though.

[luceos]

Also take into consideration flarum/framework#512

[tarunmarkose]

Hey guys, quick question - will the rewritten Push system allow any extension to do a push event or only the core ones?

For example, if I created a private messaging system, could it use your push extension to send out new messages as they came along? Kinda like a global push mechanism that any extension could tie into...

[luceos]

@tarunmarkose any extension might use such an event system.

[luceos]

@franzliedke @tobscure I'm considering picking this up, my proposal would be the following:

• Create a Message Interface and an implementation of that for flarum/core that will specify some basic properties: sender, receiver, title, body.
• Create a Broadcast Interface that specifies methods that are required to send Messages, eg: send(MessageInterface $message)
• Modify the Pusher package to use this methodology, implementing the Broadcast Interface.
• Allow extensions that have a Broadcast implementation to register themselves and make core send Messages over all registered Broadcasts. Any easy way of doing this? Maybe a seperate event, RegisterBroadcaster?

Also I agree the pusher rewrite is a seperate issue related to this, but requires this to be completed.

In hindsight, Channel (or MessageChannel) over Broadcast.

Awaiting feedback.

[franzliedke]

I'd say we need separate issues for most of these.

First step: Implementing the interfaces.
Second step: A manager for broadcasts (possibly one implementation of the interface that has references to all other instances). I can take care of that.
Third step: Adapting the extension.

[tobyzerner]

Sounds good to me.

[luceos]

This might be great solution for the manager: https://github.com/notifymehq/notifyme @franzliedke