In a few of my projects I need to provide feedback using notifications, configurable by the user. What I need is a lightweight framework that allows a user to subscribe to notifications via various channels, e.g. growl, taskbar notification, email, sms, instant message, etc. Varying levels of severity, perhaps 5.

I’ve not researched this a huge amount, so there is likely something out there that can provide most of my requirements. Initial searches show up web service solutions, but I need this to be local to the client machine or network for some channels of notification.

Requirements

• Subscribe to notifications from various channels with various levels of severity (thinking logging conifgurations)
• Fire notification events and let the framework handle distributing them to the subscribers

Implementation

• Configure new plugin wrapper via a configuration file – probably go down the Spring route for this
• OSX growl implementation using a native libgrowl library
• Windows growl implementation, libgrowl, using the java library that supports GNTP (Growl Network Transport Protocol)
• Java 6 system tray integration for taskbar notifications – looks crap on OSX

Progress

Initial concept developed and working, but not a reusable library