What does Pusher do exactly?

VIRUXE

For me I thought that Pusher would for example enable actual Push notifications on my Android phone if I perhaps left the page open or even on my windows chrome browser a message would popup just like it does on messenger.com or even on gmail.com.

paul

VIRUXE I think that is the idea.

jordanjay29

VIRUXE It won't connect with Android's notification shade, but it will change the browser tab title and display the New Discussions alert at the top of the page, which is viewable from the browser/android task switcher.

VIRUXE

jordanjay29 If that is truly the case then it is very unfortunate. Because from the name 'Pusher' I was expecting to get actual push notifications where they are supported.

adasiek

luceos I am using pusher from 2 months or so and never had any problem with connections limit.

Edit: But I have small forum, internal one 🙂

luceos

Pusher is a websocket. Websockets work like this:

The browser of the visitor runs javascript that connects with a remote server. This connection is immediate in comparison to ajaxed requests. Any push from the remote server can be handled immediately by the browser, no page refresh is needed.
The php code can trigger push events by calling the server which sends the events to specific channels. Channels can be specific for users, groups or for everyone. Channels can also contain user information if they are private.
Websockets are in no way a method of sending/receiving push messages to android or ios etc. They can however show direct notifications ON THE PAGE, if the page is open in the browser.
A good example of a websocket implementation would be an online indicator. If someone would go offline (close the browser) an event is triggered which can remove the color green for the indicator of that user. This effect is immediate, anyone having a page open with that users' indicator will see the change happen directly.
Another good example - currently implemented - is telling the browser that a new post has been created. The index will then show a yellow bar with a message that new messages await.
When you compare websockets with xhr/ajax polling, the difference is that polling doesn't scale well. With 1000 concurrent users and a polling interval of 5 seconds your server will be hammered with 30.000 requests per minute caused just by the polling mechanism. Websockets bring a very slim connection up with the user, where authentication is only required once. It then sends (outgoing data) to the user whenever an event happens that needs to update the client browser. This causes payload to be transfered only when something happens and does not cause a xhr/ajax request to the server at all.

jordanjay29

VIRUXE It does do push notifications, just to a different client: the browser.

0E800

Apologies for necroposting but does pusher work with flarum and is there a tut or extension?

Kakifrucht

0E800 It comes with a bundled pusher extension which is very straight forward to setup.

Demon

Can i send push notification with pusher for special members group only ? like (push notification only for paid memebers etc)

thanks

Kakifrucht

Demon No, not with the bundled extension, you would have to modify it.

NiranjanBala787

I think the bundled extension only notifies on new post

Wagnerbrock

Appreciate all the feedback above. For me https://zetpush.com/ has done the trick. I can use segmentation with this. I can also filter my subscribers.
Mr. #Demon - with zetpush you can deal with your special members' group.

Thanks.

MikeJones

Is there a way to incorporate chrome pop up notifications?

Frink

MikeJones I was going to make an extension for this, but never quite got around to it. I might eventually, but for anyone wanting to, check out my github profile (PartialDevAdmin) and look at the popup-notify program, it has some example alert code that you could use if you were wanting to implement this

MikeJones

Frink This would be a sweet extension. Totally support you when you have time lol

draeron

flame care to list the open source alternative which can be used instead of pusher?

luceos

draeron slanger is a ruby based server, not sure it is still maintained and active. You can find it on github.
You can also use kyrne/websocket which only costs a few bucks no matter how much traffic you need because you can install it. It's a premium extension.

askvortsov

draeron I'd recommend checking out this thread: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8395900/open-source-alternatives-to-pusher. There's quite a few options, some of which seem to be compatible with clients using Pusher (ie flarum's bundled pusher system might work). Haven't tested that though. You might also be interested in the premium websockets extension, which does all the setup for you: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/23473-websockets-locally-hosted-alternative-for-pusher/12.