*****
NOTE: This is no longer actively maintained or correct. There is now a W3C / IETF 
Web Push protocol specification.  If your interested, please see 
https://github.com/mozilla-services/push-service/ for how Mozilla has implemented
a Web Push service.
*****


PUSH NOTIFICATIONS

Requirements:
-------------
Make sure you have the following software already
installed before proceeding:

- Erlang runtime R14B+ or newer
- Make
- Python 2.6 (with virtualenv installed)

Note to users of RHEL 5 and derived distributions (e.g. CentOS 5):
Due to the EPEL package update policy, EPEL 5 contains Erlang version
R12B-5, which is relatively old. rabbitmq-server supports R12B-5,
but performance may be lower than for more recent Erlang versions,
and certain non-core features are not supported (SSL support, 
HTTP-based plugins). Therefore, we recommend that you install the most
recent stable version of Erlang. The easiest way to do this is to use a
package repository provided for this purpose by the owner of the EPEL
Erlang package. Enable it by invoking (as root):

wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/epel-erlang.repo http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/peter/erlang/epel-erlang.repo

and then install or update erlang with yum install erlang. 

Note: RabbitMQ was selected to address the message persistance issues. Sadly,
ZeroMQ does not offer message persistance across app/server reboots.


Installation:
-------------
Make sure any currently running rabbitmq server (if there
is one) is stopped before continuing.

After downloading the repository for the first time, 
cd into the directory and run make.

This will do the following:
- Create a virtual python environment 
- Install required python packages into this environment
- Fetch the rabbitmq server and set up a configuration
- Install rabbitmq plugins

After make completes all of these tasks, if it hasn't
terminated with an error then everything should be set.

The default RabbitMQ configuration is designed not to
interfere with any other rabbitmq server installed on the
system (so long as a previous installation has not set any
environment variables used by the server).

In addition, you'll need to start the rabbitmq server and do the following:
* Create a new Exchange called "incoming_exchange" (type: direct, durable, VHost: /)
* 




Running the Server:
-------------------
The message broker (used by the server to route messages)
and the HTTP server must be started separately. The steps
are (starting from the root project directory)

1. Run "./bin/rabbitmq-server/sbin/rabbitmq-server"
   to start the message broker. 
   To shut it down at any point in the future, run 
   "./bin/rabbitmq-server/sbin/rabbitmqctl stop"

2. Run "bin/paster serve development.ini" to start the
   POST Office and Client Agent HTTP server.

Monitoring the Server:
----------------------
You can monitor the RabbitMQ server once it has started by 
navigating to http://localhost:55672/mgmt in a browser (if 
you're using the out-of-the-box configuration). This takes
you to the RabbitMQ Management web console, which itself is
relatively self-explanatory. Note that this should really 
only be used for development purposes, as having the 
management console running can reduce througput.
You can read more about the Management plugin here:
http://www.rabbitmq.com/management.html