Plasticx Blog

Last month before RailsConf Luke Francl and I published "MMS2R : Making email useful" on PeepCode. Its a PDF book so kill all the trees that you can buying it. The book is awesome because of the diversity of experience that Luke brings to the book and Geoffrey Grosenbach is a fabulous editor.

We cover a wide range of experience dealing with MMS in Rails and other applications. An overview is:

• Introduction (protocol, mobile networks, gateways, etc.)
• A Brief History (MMS integrated with web apps, etc.)
• Processing MMS
• Working with ActionMailer (e.g. Rails, daemonizing Rails, IMAP & POP fetching)
• Testing (Test::Unit & RSpec)
• Advanced Topics

MMS2R handles more than just MMS

You may not be aware of this but MMS are just multi-part MIME encoded email. And Luke likes to say that MMS2R is good for email in general not just MMS. MMS2R pulls apart multipart email in an intelligent manner and gives you access to its content in an easy fashion. It writes each part decoded to temporary files and provides a duck typed CGI File so that it is easily integrated with attachment_fu.

Pimp my WWR

I put a lot work into MMS2R so that its easy to access user generated content in an intelligent fashion. Recommend me on Working With Rails if you’ve benefited from this experience and thank you in advance!

Friends of MMS2R

MMS2R and our book would not have been possible without the help of these awesome people from the open source community:

• Dave Myron
• Shane Vitarana
• Will Jessup
• Jason Haruska
• Layton Wedgeworth
• Vijay Yellapragada
• Jesse Dp
• Julian Biard
• Zbigniew Sobiecki