Right now I'm experimenting with socket keepalive, which I think may be important to keeping socket connections open (per some discussion I found from an Apple dev). If my tests go well I'll send a pull request later tonight!
The one thing I haven't figured out yet is how to stop messages from being dropped after feedback comes in. It has a tendency to silently fail to send messages. My current solution is to check for errors before a write, and do a IO.select on the socket to wait for a read for an arbitrary amount of time. You might want to look at some of the weird stuff I had to do in here.. it's a problem I'd like to figure out how to deal with: https://github.com/geoloqi/lead_zeppelin/blob/master/lib/lea...
Interesting. We haven't hit that issue yet.
Hmmm. We also haven't had any issues with feedback affecting our outgoing messages. Yeah we just check for messages from the feedback socket after sending a notification (as Apple's guide recommends) but we're not doing anything fancy like waiting for a response. Sounds cool though.
And yep. We're using the enhanced protocol while opening another connection to the feedback service. I just followed this section of the docs.
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Networ...
I'm also working on an APNS gem called Lead Zeppelin, which is similar in design, but adds a few things like a pool of connections (read: concurrent on threaded systems like JRuby and Rubinius): https://github.com/geoloqi/lead_zeppelin
There is some high quality code here, this is a great start. I think the error handling needs to be drilled down a bit, and there needs to be more logging. I'm definitely going to borrow some components of this.. the apns test server is really awesome! I'm happy that APNS support is improving in the Ruby community.