Question

How would one go about sending and receiving simple data such as a string from an app inside a cell phone?

Essentially, though it is not my goal, I am asking how one would create a text messaging service.

My current idea is to buy some online storage from a data-center store the string in there, alone with their intended recipient, and whenever the recipient checks the app the strings are sent him.

I would like to know if this method is possible, or if it there is a better method, or software to help me?

Additionally if this method is possible and preferable please point me in the correct direction to begin.

Answer 1

There are lots and lots of ways to do this. It all depends on what knowledge you have on web servers etc.

For sending to the device you could use GCM (http://developer.android.com/guide/google/gcm/index.html)

However this doesn’t do from the phone, only to it.

You could set up a simple web server…

• You need an HTTP server, almost all languages have one, for simple servers, if you don’t need much throughput then try something like python, otherwise have a look at Apache or something. http://httpd.apache.org/
• For a cleaner and more structured way of sending these strings I would use JSON, so the web server will need a JSON layer to handle JSON requests, have a look here: http://www.json.org/
• Once you have the request you will need to do some logic with it, this is up to you. But as soon as you get the JSON request and parse it you should be able to do almost anything with it.

This all should be really easy to implement. Then if you were to make it public (I would develop this by running the server on a local machine) then you need to have a static IP at your house, by a domain, and set it up so that the domain is pointing to your IP, if your IP is dynamic it may take a bit more to set up but you will need to look into something like FreeDNS and an updater client.

Otherwise you could just find hosting that supports the language you are going to be using (PHP, ASP.NET, or what ever) and then get something set up with them.