How do I implement actionBarSherlock?

Can I use amazon SNS plus SQS services to implement activity stream & notification in website?

• I want to implement activity & notification service in website, by googling I reached at Pusher, which provides platform to implement real time applications. Today I also come to amazon SNS & SQS service for implementing notifications but I don't know more about these. So can i use SNS plus SQS to implement notification & activity stream in website???

• Answer:

  First, a note, implementing activity streams on scale is hard work (just look at LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and even Quora etc). I would first look at various activity streams implementation model (the inbox model, the calculate and merge model, etc). SQS is Amazon's queuing service, which means you can use it to architect your code in a way that decouples certain sub systems. There are various ways to implement an activity stream. A rather common one is the inbox metaphor in which whenever user A does an activity and you need to update all the users which follows that user, you'll put a message in their inbox. This means that if user A has 10,000 followers you'll need (in the simplest implementation form, of course) to write 10,000 lines. But it wil save you the trouble of merging a user's current activity feed with user A's. To do that, you would probably want to write user A's activity to the database, and send a message into a queue (such as SQS or any other queuing mechanism such as RabbitMQ, Kestrel, Beanstalkd, Resque, Pure redis, etc) and you'll have a handler that will perform the other writes into the inbox of the users who follow user A. That way, doing these writes is not part of user A's update of the activity, and if the other users will wait a bit, that's more than fine. For notifications, SNS is not really suitable as the architecture to send notifications. It would be good to use SNS as a service to notify other services or users, however, for a full controllable email experience you are better off with SES or SendGrid or MailGun. There was this service a while back (can't remember its name) which was basically a hosted activity streams implementation that would handle all the hard work for you (I'll do my best to try and remember ;-) ).