Yesterday I launched a little tool for twitter using Ruby on Rails, Capistrano (with Deprec), and OAuth called GameTweet. This is the first Rails application I’ve deployed since I started playing with the stack a few weeks ago. The idea for GameTweet came one night when I was thinking about the old TD clan website before the site went down. There used to be a feature for anyone who wanted to be text messaged when a game was about to start where a user could put in their phone number and carrier and any member of the site could send out a mass text to those on the list notifying them when they were going to play. Fast forward a few years into the future and we have Twitter, which works with most phones and can notify users when a message is posted.
The idea was simple: Use Twitter to notify my friends when and where I was playing a game, specifically a PC game.
I remembered that Twitter was implementing a new authentication method which might just work for something like this, as basic authentication always seemed dirty to me. Why would anyone in their right mind hand out their username and password? A quick Google for “Twitter OAuth in Ruby on Rails” and I hit the Twitter OAuth examples. It didn’t take much to fashion the quick and dirty example into a working system. Actually, I’d estimate I was in the single digit hour range as for work involved. It was simple, which seriously scared me. Capistrano and Deprec really made the process extremely painless. More on that later.
OAuth came easy. All I had to do was follow along in the step by step example from Twitter’s wiki and then register my application with Twitter’s OAuth Client page. Perhaps the hardest part was debugging and testing, as the current Twitter system doesn’t appear to have a test sandbox.
So GameTweet was born. Just login to Twitter via OAuth and then type the IP:Port combination of the server you’re playing on, then the name of the game, and hit “Tweet!”. GameTweet then uses OAuth to update your status with all that information as well as a tinyurl to the GameTracker server status page using the tinify_urls plugin.
Capistrano, the Ruby based task automator, is perhaps the single most amazing piece of scripting I’ve seen in awhile. Coupled with the deployment recipes from Deprec, I was able to manage everything from code checkout, releases, deployment and even the Apache configuration all from one “cap deploy”. I managed to get an installation of SMF2 (a php based forum) deploying with Capistrano as well. Really, it is a joy to work with. After making a quick change to GameTweet I just had to run an “svn commit” and “cap deploy” and everything is up on the server with the latest code, database schema, and Passenger restarted the application.
That said, GameTweet has absolutely no test harness. I’m still learning the ropes with Ruby and Rails, but I do plan on eventually implementing a full test bed. OAuth is perhaps not the best thing to start with, but GameTweet was a tool I wanted to use for myself so I built it. Fast.
If you have an idea for GameTweet, want to talk shop, criticize my horrible Ruby on Rails code, or just talk pop me an email using the contact form or send me a tweet.
