OpenSource Connections
Category: Uncategorized
Working at a small company like OSC allows for group bonding “work” activities such as RailsRumble, which create a good working environment and helps develop our skills. If you dont know what RailsRumble is, its a competition where teams of 1 up to 4 members develop a Ruby on Rails application in 48 hours from scratch. If you dont know what Ruby on Rails is, you cant be saved :P. The competition is fun, or at least the OSC team is fun (no bias what so ever) because you get together with a group of people, sometimes teams share office space, and work your brain until you pass out. One of the things this competition teaches us is managing time. What you can do in 48 hours might vary from person to person, but its still 48 hours people!
Our entry for 2008, see blog posts here and here, used a SMS service called Zeep Mobile. We needed to be able to communicate with our users, specially those who would be using our app on the go, and texting was the best solution. We came up with the idea for our app the day the competition started, so we didnt have time to do a lot of research on providers and available APIs for such a service. In retrospect, Zeep Mobile still seems the best free solution there. The one problem with this service is that the learning curve turned out to be too steep for the 48 hours we had.
One of my teammates was charged with handling the integration between Zeep Mobile and our application. That task took about a day, half the time we had to build EVERYTHING! That is too much time. So a light bulb lit above my head. I always wanted to contribute to the rails community but have never had the way to do it. I have no experience building plugins or gems, so this was a good project to learn. Unfortunately, I discovered what my teammate had a year ago, how hard it is to integrate Zeep Mobile!!!
No Worries! ZeepIt is here to help 😀
My first plugin, ZeepIt, is designed to get your app ready to go with Zeep Mobile. All you have to do is install the plugin and you automatically have a URL for Zeep Mobile to forward SMS to and a way to parse those texts. The plugin uses the zeep/messaging gem provided by Zeep Mobile to provide a the MVC structure needed to leverage the service.
The plugin is available on GitHub: http://github.com/ychaker/zeep_it/tree/masterDocumentation is available on Rdoc.info: http://rdoc.info/projects/ychaker/zeep_it References:
- RailsCasts
- Ruby on Rails guides
- RailsMagazine
- Zeep Mobile
- Google (of course)
If you have any comments, questions or concerns please feel free to contact me which ever way you like. I would love to hear your feedback. ZeepIt is also on twitter @ZeepIt. (by the way, as I said, its my first plugin, so be gentle)