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Raptor let's you build realtime Ruby, Rails and Javascript apps.

Introduction

Raptor is a realtime messaging and presence server written in Ruby. It's built for anyone who wants to run and manage their own realtime messaging server. The architecure uses EventMachine for concurrency, Websockets for realtime communication and Redis for scaling. Raptor takes a lot of inspiration from the Pusher protocol (http://www.pusher.com) - basically it started as an excercise to copy it.

The velociraptor is also the best dinosaur that ever lived and means "quick-thief".

Why

Raptor started as a project to build my own messaging server to replace Faye because I needed a better way to manage presence (who's online and in which channels). I really liked how Pusher used different types of channels to expose more features and security, so I started implementing their three main channel types: public, private and presence channels. I added a fourth type of channel called a 'privilaged' channel which let's only privilaged users see who's online and be able to publish messages on the channel (think UNIX-style permissions). Raptor also uses URLs to define realtime resources since this leads to a more RESTful implementation.

To subscribe to realtime comments on your photo gallery, you'd subscribe to:

/channels/private/my-photo-gallery/comments

This is what the URL structure means:

/private: the type of channel we're subscribing to

/my-photo-gallery/comments : the url we're subscribed to

To publish a comment on your photo gallery, you'd publish it to the same URL:

/channels/private/my-photo-galleries/123/comments

Raptors

Because Jurassic Park (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO5wryDdEI0)

Features

  • Authentication - use your Ruby app to authenticate users's access to a channel
  • Webhooks - get notified about events that occur within Raptor
  • Presence - see who's online and get notified when they leave or join
  • Scalable - Raptor stays in-sync across as many instances as you need
  • Secure - use SSL to secure your websockets

Next up:

Channel message permissions - restrict some members knowing about others on a channel Wild card channels Statistics - get event and presence statistics Web interface - manage Raptor nodes and visualize statistics

Getting Started

$ git clone 'url/to/raptor-server/repo'
$ cd raptor-server
$ bundle install

To launch the server:

$ raptor

Channels

There are three types of channels: public, private and public.