Publishing and subscribing are through SQL SELECT statements which can be called straight forward enough from most or all languages. Administering it does indeed require shell or ruby. Better still in my opinion if possible, implement your business logic in PL/pgSQL procs with these SELECTs within them and call them from whatever client/frontend you are using. I know it's not cool right now but there's big advantages and a disadvantage to putting business logic in the DB is said to be vendor lock but when it comes to Postgres, lock me up and throw away the key.