What are some ways that I can implement notifications in a Rails application?

Question

The simplest example here to think of are Facebook notifications, for example when somebody posts a comment on your status, likes your photo, or just sends you an invite to some

Answer 1

I use my existing User model for this, by way of a serialized messages array.

Add a messages column (TEXT type) to your user table, via migration:

add_column :users, :messages, :text, :null => false, :default => "--- []"

Then serialize it in your user model:

serialize :messages, Array

Now, you can do this:

# Add messages
@user.messages.push "You have a new message!"

# Read messages
@user.messages # => ["You have a new message!"]

# Clear one message
@user.messages.delete_at(0)

# Clear all messages
@user.messages.clear

# Get message counts
@user.messages.empty? # => true
@user.messages.count  # => 0

If you need more detailed messages with multiple parameters (from, subject, importance), you could always use a hash instead.