I have created an instant messenger chat application where by messages are posted to my server via a php service and stored in a mysql backed.
If a user has their 'inbox' page open and a new message is received I would need to update the table to show any new messages. The way I am doing this at the moment is by sending an http request to the server every 5 seconds.
As you can imagine this is pretty inefficient. What methods are available which would be more suitable and less resource heavy?
I have looked at keep alive connections and web sockets but Im not sure which direction I should be going in?
any help much appreciated!
Your approach is called polling, which is not efficient because it consumes more electricity from your phone and you have extra load to your server. The correct way of doing it is though Apple's push notification. Here is the tutorial for that. Basically your server will send request to Apple's push notification center when a new message is received.
However in your case it's a bit more complicated. You want this notification only after user entering the mail page. So you need to tweak your php server to send notification only after user entered the mail page. In this case you are sending only one request to your server telling it to start sending notifications, instead of constantly polling your server
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As the title says, I would like to know if there is any way to send emails without having to use an external service, that charges me for sending the messages, or having to use an SMTP server in which each user has to be registered.
I have also seen pages like email.js but I don't want to have to pay for that if there is a possibility to do it on my own. It is also not useful for me to open the Gmail or messaging application of the device itself since I already know how to do that and it is not what I want.
For better understanding, I will give an example of what I want to do.
What I want is that from my application the user writes a message and from there that email message is sent to several different users from a list, without having to log in or anything, since the emails will be sent from my own email account. gmail that I have specifically created for the application.
I have seen the smtp server but from the information that I have seen that server implies that I have to log in to be able to have the token and that is not what I want because I want that once I configure everything there is no need to do anything else that people receive your messages and that's it.
I don't know if this is possible but I hope someone can help me.
Sending emails without your user logging in would require you to have either the credentials stored in the app (which is unsafe) or use a custom backend server that will host all the credentials that cannot be extracted. I would advise going with the backend route because it is easier to setup and your application will simply perform a HTTP request to get it done.
From the documentation of the mailer package, you can implement the server method pretty easily and get it moving. You will have to find a free web hosting service to deploy to.
There would really be otherwise no other way to get what you desire for virtually free.
We are developing an app with a chat feature. We have an ejabberd (15.02) configured to use mod_offline_post to use the offline message hook and forward all messages for offline clients to an url of our own which then forwards to the GCM.
However as we are developing an app, we also need XEP-198 (stream management) enabled to handle connection loss. This is working fine in itself. Streams are created and resumed, messages are acknowledged.
The problem is, that the jabber is waiting for a stream to resume and is not forwarding any offline messages to the offline message hook and thus to our mod and post url. It is storing them in its offline storage of course and they get delivered when the recipient resumes its stream.
Is there any way to configure the jabber to call the offline message hook while ejabberd_c2s:fsm_next_state:2517 Waiting for resumption of stream for... ?
PS: We use smack on the client side to provide stream management
In my understanding the behaviour of ejabberd is correct from the XMPP specification point of view. It is doing the right thing and should not in that case forward message to the offline store, because you are not offline technically.
It is just not the right place to place your push processing.
Can anybody give me a possible reason why my QSSLSocket would stop sending and receiving data without firing a stateChanged or disconnected signal.
My app starts a thread which connects to Facebooks XMPP server, authenticates and then goes into a while loop calling waitForReadyReady(10000) and then if this returns true it will read the data. Sometimes, After a while this call to waitForReadyReady will never return true even though there should be something to read and if I try to send data at this point the server won't receive anything.
I am sending pings to the XMPP server and can detect when this has happened after not receiving a reply to my ping but it's not really usable as an app until I get to the bottom of why communication is sometimes just breaking down between client and server.
Can anybody offer any insights please?
Working on a SIP application that requires monitoring call activity/state on a phone. My app (UA) is registered with a proxy server, as is the phone being monitored. I am making use of SUBSCRIBE/NOTIFY messages to tell the phone that I want to know about its "dialog" events, and once subscribed, this works fine. I am running into two problems:
I am requesting a subscription length of 900 seconds and consistently getting some absurd amount of 4000+ seconds returned from the phone.
There is the possibility that the phone may be unplugged while the subscription is active (don't ask, but, yes, this is a possibility). When this happens, I am not getting any type of notification as to the phone no longer being available. Consequently, I have to wait for my subscription to time out, try and renew it, handle the failure, and create a new subscription.
I realize that I can renew my subscription sooner than its expiration time, but is there a better way to go about it? For example, would I be able to get "presence" events and use them to know when the phone is there or not? Are those events always guaranteed to happen on phone start-up, and even so, since there is a proxy in the middle, would I even get the notifications, or would I still not know that the phone restarted and no longer recognizes my subscription(s)? Are these "presence" updates something that I can request from the proxy?
Any insight would be great; for the moment, I'm going to simply try and refresh my subscription on a much smaller interval, but I would love to know if there is a better way to go about it. Thanks in advance.
I don't know about a SIP agnostic way other than perhaps somehow pinging the phone but there is definitely a SIP way to do presence and that's using the same subscribe/notify model you are using for dialogs but in this case for presence. The relevant standard is RFC 3856 A Presence Event Package for the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).
Typically the presence notifications would be generated by a SIP registrar, and since you say your phone is registering with your proxy it must also have a registrar built in. The registrar would notify your UA when the other phone's registration status changes such as when it first came online or when it failed to re-register. As far as the delay between a phone "disappearing" and the registrar server detecting it there's no prescribed way to do it. You can either wait for the registration period to expire and mark the phone as offline when it fails to register or alternatively the server could actively send a packet or even a SIP request such as an OPTIONS request to the phone and mark it as offline if it got a failure response, Asterisk uses te latter approach.
When a SIP UAC client registers with a SIP UAS Registrar, the SIP client provides a Expiry Header, which indicates that maximum amount of time after which a SIP client needs to re-register itself. If the SIP client does not re-register itself in this time period, then Sip UAS proxy/registrar server will mark the client as disconnected.
Proprietary SIP packages like FreePBX and Asterisk, proactively, send SIP OPTIONS to the client, continuously, at some interval, wherein the client responds with OK. This is a more proactive way of validating if SIP clients are online; however, this technique is proprietary and not part of the actual SIP specification.
I am basically writing a XMPP client to automatically reply to "specific" chat messages.
My setup is like this:
I have pidgin running on my machine configured to run with an account x#xyz.com.
I have my own jabber client configured to run with the same account x#xyz.com.
There could be other XMPP clients .
Here is my requirement:
I am trying to automate certain kind of messages that I receive on gtalk. So whenever I receive a specific message eg: "How are you" , my own XMPP client should reply automatically with say "fine". How are you". All messages sent (before and after my client replies) to x#xyz.com but should be received by all clients (my own client does not have a UI and can only respond to specific messages.).
Now I have already coded my client to reply automatically. This works fine. But the problem I am facing is that as soon as I reply (I use the smack library), all subsequent messages that are sent to x#xyz.com are received only by my XMPP client. This is obviously a problem as my own client is quite dump and does not have a UI, so I don't get to see the rest of the messages sent to me, thereby making me "lose" messages.
I have observed the same behavior with other XMPP clients as well. Now the question is, is this is a requirement of XMPP (I am sorry but I haven't read XMPP protocol too well). Is it possible to code an XMPP client to send a reply to a user and still be able to receive all subsequent messages in all clients currently listening for messages? Making my client a full fledged XMPP client is a solution, but I don't want to go that route.
I hope my question is clear.
You may have to set a negative presence priority for your bot..
First thing to know is that in XMPP protocol every client is supposed to have a full JID. This is a bare JID - in your case x#xyz.com with a resource in the end e.g. x#xyz.com/pidgin or x#xyz.com/home (where /pidgin and /home are the resource). This is a part of how routing messages to different clients is supposed to be achieved.
Then there are the presence stanzas. When going online a client usually sends a presence stanza to the server. This informs about e.g. if the client is available for chat or away for lunch. Along with this information can be sent a priority. When there are more than one clients connected the one with the highest priority will receive the messages sent to the bare JID (e.g. ClientA(prio=50) and ClientB(prio=60) -> ClientB receives the messages sent to x#xyz.com). But there are also negative priorities. A priority less than 0 states that this client should never be sent any messages. Such a stanza might look like this
<presence from="x#xyz.com/bot">
<priority>-1</priority>
</presence>
This may fit your case. Please keep in mind it also depends on the XMPP server where your account is located, which may or may have not fully implemented this part of the protocol.
So to summarize: I recommend you to look through the Smack API how to set a presence and set the priority to <0 for your bot client right after it connected.