A while back a guy named Russ Bradberry created a node module that implements a node client for Boxcar’s APIs. Per Ejeklint, from Sweden, recently decided to take that functionality one step further and wrap it into a working hook with hook.io.

As he put it, “During my spare time I keep an eye on emerging technologies and quite recently discovered node.js and its impressive ecosystem. One particular node framework of interest is hook.io, an endeavor to develop a small and effective event based framework for just about any kind of I/O. You can see it as an Enterprise Service Bus framework for node. With hook.io it becomes very easy to develop highly modularized applications with excellent decoupling and minimal dependencies between modules.” 

Per also wrote an “introduction for dummies” that further explains the idea.

Per decided to write his own hook and make it available, so now it’s drop-dead-easy to incorporate Boxcar notifications to hook.io-based applications. Just get the API keys you need from Boxcar, install hook.io-boxcar, create your configuration file and start it up.

Voilá! You can then send notifications from any node process just by calling, for example:

hook.emit('boxcar::broadcast', 'Service XYZ up and running again!');

A real beauty of hook.io is that one doesn’t even have to stop any processes to deploy it. Just start the hook and it starts listening for the events that triggers it.