I currently have an small application that I have been using to learn java/android programming. Right now I have a setup were the app on one phone sends a request (via sms) to another phone running the same app. The remote phone receives the request and sends back some info. Next I would like to try this from the web. Is there an established "best" way to to this?
I was thinking I would have a web server send requests to the device via google cloud messaging and then have the device return the data directly to the web server. (Not that I really know how to do any of that just yet).
I see that there is a google cloud messaging return path (send messages from the device to the google cloud server, but it seems very new, do I need something like that? The main thing I want is to be able to ask the phone to do something when I want, not have it poll to see if there is a request, or just periodically update some status.
UPDATE:
Thanks to the answers below for confirming to me that I was on the right track.
I now have some basic functionality.
I started out using this gcm android demo code
https://code.google.com/p/gcm/source/browse/#git%2Fgcm-client%2Fsrc%2Fcom%2Fgoogle%2Fandroid%2Fgcm%2Fdemo%2Fapp%253Fstate%253Dclosed
and this ruby gem
https://github.com/spacialdb/gcm/blob/master/README.md
between the above two I was able to send a message to my phone pretty easily.
To get the round trip working, I setup a very simple rails app on heroku.
I included a modified version of the sample code in the gcm gem in a controller and then used
HttpPatch (needed for rails 4) to send a post/patch from my phone to my web app, the controller then echoes the message back to my phone.
I guess it would be nice to get the two way gcm stuff to work, but I am not sure there are any gems that handle that, and I am not qualified to handle a task like that :)
I would say it's the right call: Google Cloud Messaging for Android
From the site Android Developer:
This could be a lightweight message telling your app there is new data
to be fetched from the server (for instance, a movie uploaded by a
friend), or it could be a message containing up to 4kb of payload data
(so apps like instant messaging can consume the message directly).
In this case you don't want to fetch data from the server but you want to send them.
You can send them in different ways. I would suggest, since you are learning, to try a RESTful solution using one of the implementation of JAX-RS.
As a short and direct answer for beginner : GCM (Google Cloud Messaging) would solve your issue. However, if your app turned out to be something bigger, other more technical and complicated solutions are present too.
see this link.
Related
I have apps on Android & iOS, & I need to send push-notifications to them from Java-server.
Please tell me, where can I find guides how to do this? I'm looking GCM & APN for Android.
https://firebase.google.com/
That is what I use for project and I am satisfied with it.
You have all needed tutorials and docs to start working with it.
Overview:
firebase provides You with Admin SDK wich helps You build Data and Notification messages and send it to firebase, firebase then sends it to either iOS or Android if You send it to specific client or to both if You send it to some created topic.
It also have easy to use Android, iOS, JavaScript libs to handle it on client-side.
ofc to get this work with Your server Client must generate notification token from provided google api and send it to Your server to store in DB.
there are some restriction though with push notifications 2kb if I remember correctly and 4kb for data messages keep it in mind when you create your communication architecture :)
I have a very basic design of my entire application, where several users with my app on there android devices commits data to the server (I have used REST web services(java) + postgresql as my server) through HTTP post request from the android application. I am successful in achieving this and app runs absolutely fine. Now i want to implement a scenario where any change(CRUD operations) on my db on server should create a notification on my users android device. How should i achieve this with my server design unchanged? I have looked into Google Cloud Messaging, but could figure out the server implementation.
For now i have implemented db triggers on postgresql and able to get control back into java code using Notify/Listen feature of postgresql. From here i need to connect to android device. How can this be achieved. Is Google Cloud Messaging the only way? I have not seen any insert/update statements in there server implementation. Could anyone please guide me on this?
either you can use GCM or implement a Socket at server end and open a socket connection from mobile but this approach may add some additional processing overhead because it will create a daemon thread to listen socket port from mobile device.
You should use native library (NotificationManager etc.), here you can find a great tutorial.
My Advice is for you to use GCM. GCM normally takes a maximum of 4kb, so you could have your own defined "commands". You could use them to determine the requests on both ends, ie on android app and the server end. A php script on the server would help you in this.
I am working on an app where by the android app sends messages to the server via POST and the server forwards the message to the appropriate user via GCM. In my case I have very many things to share so in that case I am using commands, for example if it is a new incoming message I send a GCM to the app with one variable as the command and the rest as the data. On the android app I use the command variable to determine what to do with the data.
Kindly avoid that socket advice, it will have your app drain the battery to sustain the open socket , besides you don't have to re-invent the wheel while Google servers already has it
We already have a quite complex mobile backend written in Java which is deployed and works fine, so we do not have any need to use the Google mobile backend. Now we have requirements for pushing some data from the back end to the phone. Earlier I used GCM regularly. Our first requirement is only simple messaging, but it may evolve to something like a pub sub (phones subscribing to topics).
The issue I am not understanding is should I now use GCM like before, and later develop my own pub/sub overlay, or can I use the products Google has developed for that? Is this even possible, since everything I am finding on Google pages is just related to communication between Android phones via their cloud storage, so no library for communication between a custom back end and a phone?
In short, what should I use, regular GCM or is there something Google is providing which I am not understanding?
You can use regular GCM. A custom back-end can send messages to an Android app via GCM. The library for sending messages from a 3rd party server to GCM still exists (com.google.android.gcm.server package in the Google Cloud Messaging for Android Library), but you don't have to use it - you can implement the HTTP POST requests yourself.
I've been working on an android application and I am trying to figure out how to implement a messaging feature for the application to send messages to other phones and to my web app. I have been doing a fair amount of research and I haven't yet found any ways of going about this, or at least not any straightforward ones. Could someone point me in the right direction with this? Is there a relatively simple way to get this functionality? I have found links that show how to use google's cloud service but I am extremely unfamiliar with this so I was wondering if there were other better/simpler implementations or instructions out there. Thanks in advance for the help.
For security and privacy reasons, your phone/tablet app cannot (should not) communicate directly with other devices (unless they're on the same WiFi or similar and explicitly bound via bluetooth .etc)
So the way to do this on Android is use Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM).
Your app will send a web request to your server, with the message and intended recipients.
Your server will look at this, find the C2DM IDs of the recipients, and send the message to Google's C2DM service, which will then be pushed down to each device.
Your app should have a C2DM receiver to receive these messages and process them.
Check here for more information on implementing C2DM
http://code.google.com/android/c2dm/
I want to create an application which send sms from java servlet to mobile device, it's my first time to make like this application.
I found many APIs that supports this feature, actually they confuse me, so I choose one tutorial and follow it,
here's the link of the tutorial http://www.visualgsm.com/tutorial010_send_sms_java.htm
I download VisualGSM Enterprise Server (SMS Gateway) and run it, try to make the steps as mentioned, step 3 in example 2 doesn't work.
I want to know, whether I can make real testing for sending sms? Can I receive an sms on my own cell phone??
what is the best way to send sms? I really confused :(
There's 2 ways to do this: via modem or via API service.
There are various services which provide a gateway to the carriers as a service. They are called aggregators. A few industrial grade ones are mobile messenger and ericsson other consumer grade aggregators are http://www.twilio.com/sms/.