I would like to use XMPP so that my application will send out updates to an android phone (1.5 and higher). I pretty much want to use XMPP to send push notifications to the phone.
How would i go about achieving this. At the moment my web application is running on apache tomact with a number of servlets so the android phone can access information, but I'm finding it difficult understanding how I could implement XMPP so that I can push information from the server to the client (android phone).
I have tested the below tutorial
Example of XMPP with Google ID login
It uses Google ID logins. But i need to use my webapplication to do what google implements.
Any ideas?
That would depend on the nature of your push (is it a point to point or pub sub). In either case, you will need an XMPP server that your clients and application are connected to. This will be the means for your application to send notifications to the clients.
Not sure what you mean by "I need to use my webapplication to what google implements". Your webapplication would be a client to the xmpp server, just like your phones. You cannot use xmpp to simply talk to your webapplication, unless it happens to be a bosh enabled xmpp server itself, which I would guess is not likely.
You can use Smack for your client communications, and any one of the many available servers.
If the communication is directed at specific clients, then creating a chat between the application and client is probably the simplest means. If it is more of a broadcast, then you could use either MUC (multi user chat) or pubsub.
Generally, you would implement this as a pub-sub feature. Pub-sub is basically the publish/ subscribe paradigm: you publish something and they receive it.
Assuming you have an XMPP server setup that supports the pub-sub protocol extension (like eJabber), in your app, you would login to that server and subscribe to a node (where your update notifications would be sent), and with your subscription you would have to add a handler to handle any notification on that node.
On the server side, when you have something that all of your clients need to know about, you would publish the update to the same node that the clients subscribe to.
For more info, see http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html
Related
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
I'm trying to make it such that a click on my web client from a computer can "trigger" the android app to run its set function.
I've searched extensively but it seems like all methods need the mobile device to initiate a connection before the web server can even do anything.
Is there a way for the web client to be the one initiating? Also, is there any way to do this without notifying the user of the device, i.e. in the background? I'm using cakephp for the web client but any kind of answer will be appreciated. Thanks!
Use push notification system to trigger any action on your device. Push notification system such as Parse, PushApps, pubnup etc are available for free and some are paid too. Try them. Send a push notification and listen to that push message and on receiving trigger your action.
Use Google Cloud Messaging .
"Google Cloud Messaging for Android (GCM) is a service that allows you to send data from your server to your users' Android-powered device, and also to receive messages from devices on the same connection. The GCM service handles all aspects of queueing of messages and delivery to the target Android application running on the target device. GCM is completely free no matter how big your messaging needs are, and there are no quotas."[Google]
Here you'll find how to implement the GCM with PHP.
I want to have a Java-Application that is behind a firewall (maybe even connected over a 3G modem) and I have a google app-engine application.
How can the gae app push data to the clients?
I found some ways that look promising, but I'm not sure what will really work.
Sockets will not work, because I cannot connect through the firewall/3G barrier
the channel API only works with JS clients
XMPP looks very promising - the client would report it's presence and the server could push chat-messages to the client and also the client could reply that way.
But what about user-accounts? i.e. could I use a single XMPP-account for all users (and let the client send a unique ID to identify the user) - or is a unique XMPP account for every device (which runs the java-aplication behind the firewall) required?
are there any other options or are there some XMPP gotcha's you know about?
I built an Android application with Google App Engine Server. Now I want to add simple chat to my app. And I have some questions.
My users registered with theirs desired email domains like hotmail.com, yahoo.com and even more esoteric domains, thats mean that I need to create JID for them? if so is Google App engine provide JID creations with my app domain that i can manipulate?
I read that Google App Engine act as XMPP client so I need Xmpp Server that can receive and send XMPP messages. So why do I GAE for? is Openfire is my answer? can I integrate Openfire with GAE?
I Also read that if I want to use XMPP in GAE and Android in need aSmack Api for my client and that it is working on HTTP. So I guess that I'll need to poll the server for messages every couple seconds. Is there a better pattern?
can I integrate Openfire with GAE?
You cannot run Openfire on GAE because GAE works only on HTTP so you won't be able to connect over sockets as Openfire does.
My users registered with theirs desired email domains like hotmail.com, yahoo.com and even more esoteric domains, thats mean that I need to create JID for them? if so is Google App engine provide JID creations with my app domain that i can manipulate?
If I understand your question correctly, you shouldn't have any problems here. As long as you're not a spammer, we don't place any restrictions on what domains you can send to.
I read that Google App Engine act as XMPP client so I need Xmpp Server that can receive and send XMPP messages. So why do I GAE for? is Openfire is my answer? can I integrate Openfire with GAE?
You can send and receive XMPP messages via the xmpp API (this is the python version). This calls into the Google Talk infrastructure. You don't have access to what you'd traditionally call an "XMPP server", but you do have access to basic XMPP functionality.
I don't know a lot about OpenFire, but there is a Trusted Tester program for outbound sockets that you can sign up for. This is what you would need if you desire an external XMPP server.
I Also read that if I want to use XMPP in GAE and Android in need aSmack Api for my client and that it is working on HTTP. So I guess that I'll need to poll the server for messages every couple seconds. Is there a better pattern?
I should prefix this by saying I don't know a whole lot about Android or aSmack, but that won't stop me from taking a stab at answering your question. :-)
I think this depends on your usecase, but I can't think of any situation you'd need to do this off the top of my head. Will the user of your application have their own JID on a server they registered for? If so, I don't see any reason you'd have to connect via HTTP, unless that's all aSmack supports. The main use-case for BOSH/XMPP-over-HTTP is in the browser where you don't really have access to open raw sockets.
If you want to use XMPP as a messaging/notification service the user won't know about, it may be more complex. I should note that you can always set up an XMPP server on Google Compute Engine.
I am developing an Android App that communicates with a server.
How can I send a notification from my server to my Android App without the use of C2DM?
Are Sockets a good solution? What are other alternatives?
I'd suggest you to develop a webservice preferably with JSON which is easy to handle. This server client architecture will hellp you to send and receive any kind of data (ranges from raw text to images or even video)
Check out C# webservices. That are very easy to start than the PHP services IMHO.
Depends on what you want to do.
have you thought on how does the server identifies the client to send the message ? In this case the android phone ?
With http you would need the client to "request" this notification.
The closest thing to an actual notification would be to have a socket connection, which the client would connect to the server. But then would require an existent connection between the two. If this is ok for what you are doing, then go ahead if you really want to avoid C2DM.
But, using C2DM allows your server to send notification to devices without a need for a request or direct connection from the client. The only thing you need to do is pass the identification of the device to your third-party server given when you authenticate with google's C2DM. After that, you just push notification data to C2DM and google delivers the notification for you.
I've used MQTT for providing push notifications on Android and it's proved to be a good, reliable, low power solution.
Some links to support my case / get you started:
http://mqtt.org/
Power Profiling: MQTT on Android
Basic Steps for Using MQTT in android