When I wrote the Node portion of my push notification toolchain, I was
doing so because I wanted to be able to simply cURL
a URL, without having
to worry about HTTP verbs, headers, or anything else. The Node endpoint proxied
my requests for me, so that I didn’t have to worry about anything but a title and
a message.
At the time I hadn’t written any sort of local script, so being able to do
curl http://localhost/performAPush?title=Hi&message=Done
was helpful. It wasn’t until I wrote the done
script that it became apparent
that my Node proxy wasn’t really providing any value anymore.
As Jon noted via Twitter, this isn’t strictly speaking necessary. cURL
can do all of this for me, if I’m willing to do so. I could script this out
such that a shell script of some sort does the heavy lifting, rather than an
endpoint on my web server, or having to remember all the requisite cURL
options.
Paul DeLeeuw came to a similar conclusion, and put together a nice walkthrough of a PHP script he wrote to get the job done. By taking this approach, Paul didn’t need a web server; he’s tickling the Pushover URL directly.