Question

I am trying to create a chat application. The communication is based on RESTful web services(Jersey). The client communicates with the server sending HTTP requests. My problem is how to send messages from server to client without the client send a request first. I read about C2DM notifications, I suppose using this way, when the client receives the notification from the server then (the client) has to send a request to the server in order to receive the data. I also was thinking about using sockets but I don’t know if it is possible as I am using Rest. I mean in the server side can I also use sockets(sockets run in lower level) with the REST code? The only thing I have though that could work using sockets is to create another server with socket(two servers RESTful and socket), but is this a good solution? Also could I put some server code in the client side and some client code in the server side. Would it be correct and effective? What do you think? Which solution would be the best?

Answer 1

The scenario you describe sounds ideal for C2DM. If you build your own sockets set up you will drain battery and CPU resources doing something the phone is already doing – maintaining an open socket to receive messages.

C2DM is relatively straightforward to set up, and in my experience is pretty reliable.

This is the best tutorial I have seen on it:

http://www.vogella.de/articles/AndroidCloudToDeviceMessaging/article.html

But you also need to read the official docs:

http://code.google.com/android/c2dm/

Your server-side code will need to send an HTTP request to the C2DM servers to send a message to a device. To tell it where to send the message, your server needs to specify the Registration ID (which represents your app running on one specific device) and so when your app sets up on the Android device, it registers with C2DM, and then needs to send its C2DM Registration ID to your server to be stored, ready to be used to send messages to.