Celebrating five years of Pushy and announcing Pushy Console
Five years ago, we set out to add push notifications to our fledgling iOS app. We quickly discovered that the incumbent offerings for sending push notifications via Java didn’t quite meet our needs, and so started experimenting with building our own. The result of that experiment was Pushy, our open-source Java library for sending APNs (iOS/macOS/Safari) push notifications. We first shared Pushy with the world as an open-source project on August 16, 2013, and while we’re a few days late, we’re thrilled to celebrate Pushy’s fifth birthday!
A lot has changed in the five years since we started work on Pushy. What started out as something of a technical experiment has grown into a stable, mature, and powerful tool for sending push notifications at an industrial scale. While we won’t name-drop, we will say that Pushy is used by several familiar consumer-facing brands and major mobile engagement companies. We periodically receive questions and feedback from users who send tens of millions of notifications per day and billions of notifications per month. It’s amazing to see how much both the project and its impact have grown over the years.
Introducing Pushy Console
To celebrate Pushy’s fifth birthday, we’re excited to announce that we’ve started a new open-source project: Pushy Console! It’s a simple, developer-focused GUI application for sending push notifications. Pushy Console is built with JavaFX (and, of course, Pushy) and works on just about any platform that can run Java 8 or newer.
Just like Pushy itself, we started building Pushy Console when we discovered that existing GUI tools weren’t quite meeting our own engineers’ needs. In particular, it seems that most existing GUI tools for sending push notifications haven’t kept pace with the most recent developments in the APNs world, and don’t have great support for things like the new HTTP/2-based APNs API (which reports the status of each notification and adds the “collapse-id” header for grouping notifications) and token-based authentication.
Just like Pushy when we first shared it with the open-source community, Pushy Console is fully-functional, but has plenty of room to grow. Opening a new, early-stage project to the world feels fitting as we reflect on how far we’ve come since Pushy’s inception. Just as Pushy has been made better by feedback, questions, and contributions from the community, we look forward to seeing how Pushy Console will grow, change, and improve with your help. To join the conversation, please feel free to leave comments here or open issues on our GitHub project page. For the adventurous, we also welcome pull requests; we’ve even identified a handful of ideas for enhancements that would be a great starting point for new contributors. We look forward to hearing from you!
