I want to develop mobile chat backend for android and ios clients. I have experience in playframework 2 with java. Do I need to learn and use netty framework for chat backend? Playframework is also a nio framework running on netty. I can not decide which one to choose? Will be playframework enough for high traffic mobile chat backend?
The Play framework should be enough. No need to touch the bare metal (Netty) unless your doing something very complicated (special protocols, etc.). For your use case, you probably just need to familiarize yourself with the WebSocket Protocol and specifically how to set them up in play.
Your next step would be to setup the clients for android and ios. For android you could take a look at Java-Websockets and while im not familiar with iOS, a google search returned this which might be somewhere to start.
All that being said if you'd like to avoid the extra fluff that play provides (sessions, cookies, templates, routing, asset managment, Akka, etc.) and you dont think you will ever need them, then definitely go with Netty if time to learn is a non-issue. Note that with Netty the client libraries above would still apply if you use the same Websocket protocol.
Related
I am creating an app that involves sending and receiving settings... The desktop application is constantly sending information to a hosted MySQL database, and the Android app will query this same information. It is something similar to the whatsapp web (but in this case, I'll be using a desktop app instead of webpages).
Until this part, everything is working as I need... but, this same Android app will be used to send settings to the desktop app, and the desktop will read and change its settings according to what was just sent.
If I need to constantly query the hosted MySQL database and check if there is any kind of changes sent from the Android, I believe that I'll have a performance drop... each time a query loop is finished, I would have to query, check for any modifications and so on.
Is there a better or correct way to do this kind integration between two apps? I've read something about WebSockets, but I don't have much technical information about this, neither examples that I can use in this case.
Thank you very much for your knowledge sharing.
Here are some useful sites on WebSocket:
http://websocket.org
http://blog.kaazing.com/ [some useful blog posts]
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/websockets/basics/
https://goo.gl/5OaJff [mozilla site]
You may want to consider the Observer/Observables pattern. The MYSQL is the Observable and your desktop app and Android app are Observers (and you can add other Observers in the future). Its a common pattern with lots of examples out there. But you'll need a centralized WebSocket server and an Observer/Observable coordination subsystem. You can setup a pub/sub message broker that uses WebSocket with a nice JMS, MQTT, etc, API to make your life easier. ActiveMQ, IBM MQ Lite, Kaazing JMS Edition... lots of options.
full disclosure. I work for Kaazing.
Being a Java developer, i am super excited to use codenameone for an app that I am planning to write from scratch. But would like to know if codenameone supports activity detection which uses CMMotionActivity in case of ios or Google Play Services ActivityRecognition API in case of android ?
Particularly, my app would like to receive events when the user is stationary, walking, running, cycling, driving/automotive etc. Also, if i can fine tune the battery usage settings in case of location services subscription as provided by Google play services location apis, that would be great.
I hope i wont get disappointed. I was planning to learn codenameone and use it in my app only if these above features are available
I'm afraid they aren't available out of the box. However, Codename One is very flexible and you can use native interfaces to expose these features by invoking native code.
How do Mobile Apps communicate with a server? Does this communication happen over HTTP or are there other methods (for instance, I guess a mobile app could open a socket)? Does this differ form device to device? Is there one most commonly used approach? If the communication happens over HTTP how do the URLs look like? Is there a way to identify the app based on the the "User Agent" in the HTTP request if the communication is happening over HTTP?
Mobile Apps can communicate with a server in many ways. Mobile apps can also use other features of the mobile. For instance SMS , MMS. Its pretty open really. Your question could be "how do computers communicate with a server?".
A mobile app can be a simple as loading a web page. This would be http.
The problem with mobile apps. They run on phones. There are lots of different phone manufacturers and its up to them (in some case the mobile phone operators also have weight) what to allow the programmer to do by the choice of operating system.
If you are getting started with mobile apps. Take a look at android its pretty simple to get going with if you know a little about programming.
As for the useragent. It depends but usually if you are using the http api on the phone, you can set the user agent to what ever you want it to be, its just a string.
Hope this helps!
Communication usually happens over http. Applications usually identify themselves in the User Agent field
I'm developing a web based application built on codeigniter which will also have a mobile application(blackberry, iphone, android etc.). The web application will be connecting to a (mysql) database to store/retrieve/update data. I would like to know what would be the best solution for having a mobile application store/retrieve/update data.
Taking into consideration performance, flexibility, Security
Look at your device no different than if it was a browser. The are both clients. All devices (well at least Android and iOS) provide you with ways to make xhr requests, just like your browser does. So you need an API on your server that your device will use to get the data. Note that if your application does not already have an API, you will need to develop one.
I want to implement a web-based IM service on the lines Meebo. Might sound ambitious but that adds to the fun of it.
My research suggests XMPP would be a good protocol for the IM since it can talk to proprietary protocols as well. Am I right? What else would I need to complete this?
Could Google App Engine(GAE) fit in to this project? Can GAE be used to create and host the whole service? That would simplify matters significantly.Also,GAE does support XMPP.
I know what I want to make, need to know the best way to make it.
Thanks!
Suvir
GAE has an XMPP API that lets your app send and receive XMPP messages. The real sticking point with making a real time chat app using only GAE is that you can't push updates to the client. So your client would have to continually poll the server to see if there were any new messages. One way around this is to operate a comet server outside of GAE to forward the pushes to the client.
wikipedia page on comet techniques
Google App Engine allows you to use stateless HTTP requests and XMPP, but not TCP sockets. Thus you're limited to any IM services which use the former.
For an example of using the XMPP service, see Using the XMPP service:
For our example app, we're going to
write the Amazing Crowd Guru. The
Amazing Crowd Guru is a veritable
oracle, who can answer any question
you might pose it over XMPP. Writing
an omniscient computer program is no
small task, but thanks to a little
behind-the-scenes trickery, we're
going to get our users to do all the
work of answering questions for us.