I have an application that it makes requests to a webservice REST created using PHP. It's working perfectly my application makes requests and receive the data. But a want to know how can I make in my application to sincronize in real time with my server. It would be like an application messenger that receives the data automatically without an ask from user. How can I do it? Thanks
Your "real time" and "synchronization" are misleading terms. What you need is the implementation of Push mechanism. You can use cloud messaging from google, see this for details. Or checkout sockets and implement it from the low level yourself
To keep your app synced with your server, run a looping Timer on an interval in the background. Use it to check the server for new messages, and then feed those messages to the user.
Here a is an answer that may help you achieve this Android timer? How-to?.
Related
I am writing a messaging app in Swift where people can chat similar to how text messages or other popular chat apps work. The supporting API is on AWS, written in C#.
There are some points of interest here:
Hoping to avoid third party stuff like Firebase, etc, but open to listening to advice
Alert notifications are not desired for now - no popups, banners, etc. Simply want to show message bubbles arrive in real time on one viewcontroller - if and only if the person is staring at the message screen. If they're somewhere else on the app, nothing happens.
We don't want to prompt the user to ask them if they're OK with this app sending notifications because we're not sending them banners or anything visual, aside from a new chat arriving. Is that a requirement with APNS? I feel like this means someone can say NO, and then we have no way to update the chat app in real time, which won't fly.
I assume a simple approach would be some sort of timer/loop that runs from the message viewcontroller, where every second or two it hits the API and asks if there are new messages, but that seems inherently wrong to me - the app must be robust, and there could be thousands or hundreds of thousands of people using this - that's a lot of API requests, and in many cases there could be no new messages, thus a wasted call. This is clearly not the way to go, correct?
Question # 1
I was thinking, then, that I should use APNS, however am not sure if it requires you to prompt the user to ask them for permission to receive anything from Apple? Again my concern is the chat bubbles should come in at real time and don't want to give the user the ability to somehow not see these (breaking the app)
If APNS is the way to go, and I must prompt them, then I assume the flow is I will gather my device ids (created in appdelegate, saved in my C# db, and associated to each message thread) and whenever someone types a message, it goes to my API, I save it in the message database table, and then I send out a message to APNS to everyone's device id.
Apple queues this up, and sends to everyone, and if they're on the screen, then the message comes in.
Is this how I should leverage APNS to achieve what I want?
Question # 2 I've seen others recommend using SNS (in conjunction with APNS) however I don't understand why. Doesn't APNS both act as a proper queue, as well as a notification service, thus invalidating the need to use AWS's SNS/SQS at all? It seems redundant to me but maybe I just don't understand the idea behind why you need both technologies.
Appreciate anyone's time in advance if they can shed some light on this for me!
Thanks!
Question 1
Even if you're using WebSockets (As #stevenpcurtis mentioned), you still need to inform user about the fact that user received message when application is in background/suspended. And yes, you must "force" your user to enable notifications for the application and explain why he needs it. Empirically, if user installs messenger, he understands what are notifications used for and why he enables it.
Question 2
From the mobile perspective SNS will still deliver Push notifications when user receives notification while the application is in background or suspended. From the backend perspective you can use SNS.
Conclusion:
From the mobile perspective you have 2 modes:
Application is active - it's generally up to you how to receive messages. (Web Sockets, pushes, e.t.c.)
Application is in the background or is suspended: You need a tool to inform user about changes without having a control on application. This is the job for Push Notification Service. The way you will send pushes from the backend is up to you.
You can also check This question to get some more information.
I am trying to write an iOS app that will notify the user on price changes of products I access as JSON information via an API. I want to have a background task that will repeatedly check the server every n minutes for new JSON and send the user a notification if certain conditions are met. What would be the correct way to do this?
As previous posters mentioned, this is better done server side rather than via polling. However, using Apple Push Service to notify the client device is not the ideal solution. The issue is that delivery is not guaranteed (per Apple) and you cannot confirm delivery. The user could decline push notifications, Apple could decline to send the notification if you are sending too many, etc. You are much better off using a service like PubNub or Pusher, which push notifications to the client in a reliable way and both have iOS APIs. They are very inexpensive. If you wanted to reinvent the wheel and save money, you could look up how they work and write your own version.
You could of course do client side polling, in which case an asynchronous NSOperation is particularly well suited (it will run on a background thread and you can post notifications to NSNotificationCenter when things change). You can find out more about how to implement that here.
This does not work well. Here is a probably better solution:
Set up a server that polls the JSON data source.
When the data source changed, use Apple Push Service to notify the user.
Upon receiving of the notification, start a background fetch session.
I am developing a game for the iOS devices where the application will fetch data from a database (messages). I want the application to update to just to notify the user when there is a new message (and only when the user is in the application or when it is running). What is the best approach to this problem? I was thinking of checking with the server for new messages every 2 minutes, however I don't know how efficient that is. Please let me know if there is a better approach to this or the one I am thinking of is just fine
thanks
Polling the server is a perfectly fine solution. Your email client does it all day long. Push is not a suitable solution (message delivery is not guaranteed and if you only want messages when the app is running that is not the purpose of push notifications). See my answer to this similar question: Web Service sending information to iPhone
You could use push technology from a platform like Urban Airship.
Is there a way to send take the crash logs of my app send it to my server ? If no is there a alternative mechanism to do this ?
While i don't want to advertise products in here, a lot of our iPhone Projects make use of the Flurry Service . It is rather simple to integrate into your project (add library, one single method must be called). After integrating the flurry libraries and calls the app will send reports from the last session everytime it is started.
maybe that helps.
I'm doing research for making a chat based app for the iPhone (it's not really text chat in the regular sense, but the principles are the same).
Maximum 6 people can be logged into the same chat room at any one time, and the most basic question is how to efficiently check for new messages?
Would I need to simply poll the server periodically? Or is there a way I could trigger an event on the phone from the server whenever there is some new content to pay attention to?
If having to poll all the time, I worry about the resulting lag as each participant will have to wait longer for others before they can post their own responses to others. And, potentially it might also be too much to handle for the server to respond to lots of requests all the time. It would also waste bandwidth, which is not free for the user...
Unfortunately I will not be able to set up a socket server for this app, it has to be based around a regular LAMP configuration.
I think you can either go with push notifications, or XMPP (Jabber) server.
XMPP will allow your iphone app to receive data even when in the background using the new multitasking features (listening for a socket), and i'm pretty sure you should find ready to use servers for LAMP (or at least open source implementations).
Note that the iOS4 multitasking API doesn't support polling in the background, so your only other option should be push notifications. If you're new to push notifications, you can maybe use a service like Urban Airship that might make the process easier.
XMPP sounds good for you idea, i think this is the best technology for Chat. It alos works great in iOS apps.
Maybe this code sample will be helpful to start using XMPP in iOS app - look at this QuickBlox Chat code sample. It demonstrates how to integrate 1-1 Chat, Chat in room into your android application. Also there is guide how it works. I think there will be no problem to integrate it into your application. Otherwise - Comments system below allows to ask any question you want and get fast answer.
Also there is Demo video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SncQaJBBW_0 how this Chat works.
In my opinion the best solution is socket, but you say that you can't implement the server side for this.
You could also implement it with push notifications. You can receive the push also when your app is running and send all the data you need inside the push. Usually chat messages are short...
If you don't want to mess with push notifications on the server then the only thing left, as long as I know, is the polling.