Amaze SNS rubygem

One of the things which I have always wanted to do is to contribute back to the open source community at large. For years I have been using and adopting other people’s work so its only fair to keep the cycle moving. Since it is my first attempt at creating a ruby gem, I decided to pick an area of usage which is relatively new as well as straight forward to maintain and develop.

This started back in May and Amazon AWS just launched their Simple Notification Service(SNS) for short. After reading through their API and from my earlier brushing with the S3 request protocol for the S3 IPhone App, I had gain more familiarity with how the AWS API calls work and so I made a gem called ‘amaze_sns’ which interfaces with the SNS service.

The Amaze SNS gem is in its stable release and its version is at 1.0.1. Please note – this is different from the amaze-sns gem which has since been yanked from rubygems as it is buggy and not advisable to be used.

To install the latest version, just do

sudo gem install amaze_sns

The source code can be found at http://github.com/cheeyeo/Amazon-SNS-Rubyand the actual rubygems page on http://rubygems.org/gems/amaze_sns

So far, it has received over 400+ downloads since May but that was mainly for the older version – amaze-sns – which due to a fatal flaw I realised did not work. Apologies for those of you who downloaded that earlier version – I’m still learning what else can I say.

Version 1.0.1 is confirmed to work and supports quite a few new nifty features if I may say so

• You can now set attributes for each topic and the Policy attribute of a topic is JSON parsed so you can access it like a hash

• EventMachine support is rolled back to the earlier stable version and you can still use your own code blocks to parse the response.

• Sample code has been provided in the ‘examples’ folder.

• Fixed some weird bug whereby the Topic actions does not return the response of an action due to the way the EventMachine reactor loop exits on dual core machines running ruby 1.8.7 ??

No doubt this will be an ongoing project as the API is still in a state of flux and so expect further updates as and when they arrive.

Further plans to develop an actual Rails app to showcase it in use in production is in the pipeline.

The eventual goal is to be able to wrap up the requests call within a Rack middleware so it can parse the requests and responses away from the core app.

I have added Pledgie support on the github page – I know it is only a small thing on the whole scale of things but any contribution you make will go towards allowing me to develop this gem further.

Please feel free to forward any links of projects you have used it in and I will showcase it on a dedicated page for it.

Enjoy!