Create an internal message system with Rails

Question

I have Users that can create DinnerEvent that contain Food. User specify preferred Food using a join table. Would like to create an internal message system that automatically sends out a notice to other Users who "prefer" the Food in the DinnerEvent that was created. Can anyone provide some guidance as to how I can go about approaching this or if there are any good reference resources out there (haven't had much luck searching)? Thought about ActiveMailer but decided I wouldn't want people to get spammed all the time in their email inbox. Would prefer to only use Rails to achieve this.

Answer 1

There's a lot of options here and many use cases to think through. Maybe you can start with something very simple that:

1. Tracks the last date/time of login for each user
2. On some page (specific to the logged in user), display all DinnerEvents created since last login that match their Food preferences. Should be simple Active Record to pull this.
3. Continue to show this list until they dismiss it (record this date/time) or login again

A full blown messaging system will probably require more complex stuff like queues for each user that are subscribed to a master queue. And, possibly an additional backend data store like Redis. I'm purposefully leaving out the details of something like this for now; it's a much bigger topic.