A Story of an App Development
This document helps you to understand the basic idea of uniqush-push by telling a imaginary story of a group of app developers.
- Once upon a time, there was a group of developers developing weather report app for mobile devices.
They were from the open source community and hence preferred open platforms. Android was their choice.
- The idea of their app was naive and simple: sending weather report from their server to their app every day.
- On android platform, sending a notification to an app is easy: Google provides a cloud service, Google Cloud Message, or GCM, to help developers to send data from servers to apps.
- Developers could push any data to their apps by sending an HTTP request to the GCM cloud.
- Empowered by GCM, the developers were quite happy to write server side programs. They didn’t need to consider the systems on which the app run. GCM did all works. Everything they need to do was grabbing weather information, establishing HTTP connection to GCM cloud and sending data through this connection. Clean, easy, and less coding work.
- After several months, quite a few android users were using their weather report app. Our lucky developers were encouraged by this success and they decided to expand their business to other platforms.
- They noticed that a lot of users were willing to use cell phones developed by a fruit company making this platform so popular that they could not refuse to support.
- (To apple fans: Please forgive for not using their logo, I do not know if I can legally use their logo here. So I have to draw by myself and you can get the idea. Also, Forrest Gump told me it is OK to call it a fruit company.)
- The server side developers found documents from this fruit company knowing that they provide a similar cloud service called Apple Push Notification Service, or APNs. Again, developers need to establish a connection to APNs cloud and push data to that cloud. Then the cloud would send the data to end users.
- However, it’s a simple TCP connection this time instead of HTTP connection as in GCM. Moreover, our developers needed to use another authentication protocol in order to communicate with APNs.
- The server side program needed to be changed in order to support both APNs and GCM.
- After adding support to APNs, the project manager wanted to support more platforms, such as BlackBerry. Again, it uses a similar cloud and specific to BlackBerry devices.
- The server side developers became impatient because they were spending too much time to add support to another fancy cloud.
- They needed to focus on what to push to their customers, not how to push messages.
- No more clouds, please!
- Finally, our clever developers found uniqush-push which solved their problem perfectly.
- Developers do not need to know which cloud will be used. They just push messages.
- uniqush-push will communicate with different clouds through the cloud-specific protocol.
- After running uniqush on their server, server side developers could again simply use an HTTP connection to uniqush-push process and send messages to apps on any platform that uniqush supports.
