stripity_stripe VS noticed

I think this needs a big qualifier. I feel the same way, when it's a project I'm capable of doing the work for. For example, I recently needed a way to deal with Stripe early fraud warnings and the library I used didn't have those yet, so I added them (this was all on my own time I should add)[1].

However, there are tons of dependencies that we use for all sorts of things that are highly complex where very few people would be able to send a PR (openssl for example). Things in highly complex codebases, or deeply unfamiliar languages, etc. I maintain a forked linux driver for a wireless card for example, and I don't expect there's more than a handful of people that could hack on it without introducing tears and devastation.

For the projects I maintain, I would just say, "if you can, please consider a PR. If you're not sure it would be accepted I'm happy to be asked! If you can't send a PR, give as much info as you can and be polite. With that we're good.

[1]: https://github.com/beam-community/stripity_stripe/pull/728

I recently had to create a subscription payment solution for Tolc, a C++ to other languages bindings compiler. During the process I wish I had a simple to follow, unassuming tutorial that I could follow. Since I couldn't find one, I wrote one myself! Even though I could use the excellent stripity_stripe, I still had to overcome some pitfalls.

I'm going to attempt to answer by way of links to active projects for you:

Stripe, including webhooks support, actively developed: https://github.com/code-corps/stripity_stripe

Global pay solution that supports everything: they are all a bit crap you're right, the best I've found is https://github.com/aviabird/gringotts and ex_money really is amazing that integrates with it (I would suggest it's better than the equivalent ruby gem). To be fair I'm not sure I'd want to use the pay gem with anything complex as you need to be able to use the specific quirks of each API properly.

You're also right about noticed, after looking into it more it would be worth building for elixir for sure. Ravenx represents a start but it's unmaintained and doesn't have a huge number of strategies. It depends on how much I needed to do notifications like this. For the apps that I've built we've just needed database and grouped emails sent once per day, no need for texts or slack etc. There's no reason these couldn't be added fairly simply but I agree noticed is very neat.

These kinds of generators exist in the Noticed gemand within Rails itself via the various rails scaffold commands and even the rails new command, which is a Rails generator itself.

The Noticed gem makes developing notifications fantastically easy by providing a database-backed model and pluggable delivery methods for your Ruby on Rails application. It comes with built-in support for mailers, websockets, and a couple of other delivery methods.

I highly recommend the noticed gem for sending notifications. It supports a bunch of different delivery methods, including email, and it's really well documented.

Currently, CircuitVerse uses activity_notification gem for the Notifications but the gem is not maintained any more and the notification page is very lagging. So we decided to replace the gem and we found noticed gem by chris oliver of Gorails.

Rails developers that need to add a notification system to their application often turn to Noticed. Noticed is a gem that makes it easy to add new, multi-channel notifications to Rails applications.

Have you looked at Caffinate or noticed ?

noticed for notifications

> I think often the things that don’t exist are not there for good reasons... using Stripe’s api for example from a module is pretty trivial in my experience, it’s just HTTP and you don’t need to be super clever about it.

It's way more involved than inserting an auth token header into an HTTP request and calling some API endpoint.

For example, what about verifying webhooks? The official libraries for Stripe (Python, Ruby, Node, PHP, Go, JS, etc.) deal with this for you.

But with Elixir, you're on your own. This is very low level code to have to deal with and it's extremely important you get it right.

You're left having to parse Stripe's specification on this and then implement the code yourself in Elixir. It's so tricky and involved that the Dashbit company (the creator of Elixir and members of the core team work there) wrote a blog post on it at https://dashbit.co/blog/how-we-verify-webhooks.

But before a few months ago that blog post didn't exist. Also this isn't the only thing you'll have to do yourself when it comes to interacting with Stripe.

Then you'll have to do similar things for other payment providers all which are different in a lot of ways, but with Rails you have the combination of having official Ruby clients from those payment providers and even the Pay gem which lets you support payments from multiple providers. That could easily be a few months of dev time just for that abstraction alone if you had to go about that from scratch and your implementation wouldn't have any track record until you start using it and ironing out the bugs from real world experience.

> Again notifications doesn’t sound particularly difficult and I don’t see why I’d want to rely on some complex gem that does every option when I don’t need them

Don't take this the wrong way but this seems to be the mindset of almost everyone I chatted with when it comes to Elixir. When someone asks how to do something, the answer is it's trivial or easy to implement but there's never any examples posted on how to do it.

In my mind trivial or easy means I can sit down in maybe a few hours or a day and write a production ready solution, complete with tests and have it work exactly how I want without running into any major roadblocks.

I'd be curious to see how you would implement https://github.com/excid3/noticed or https://github.com/excid3/pay. Based on your responses of saying these things are easy I'm guessing you've written large apps with Phoenix where you've developed features like this in a production app? It would be fantastic if you could post some code examples or a blog post on how you went about this. Not just to answer my specific question but I'm sure the community would appreciate having concrete examples of how it's done. This way more folks would use the framework.