Simple Backends for Android Apps - Part 1

        In my recent lunacy I decided to take up my friends offer and work with him on a multiplayer android game. It's a dice game, but we hope that people will give it a chance since it's very addicting. I'm currently suffering from Feature Rampage, and I'm deciding to add complex features before I'm done implementing simpler ones. It's a terrible business practice but considering that we specified no budget for this and that we are doing this part time, I don't care ;) One of the features that I decided to implement was online play (including friends and chats)! It's pretty ambitious considering this is going to be the first product I ever made and that I don't know any html, http or any other language besides Java. What can I say? I learn best by doing : D

       For this post I won't dabble too much into the details of the framework, instead I'm going to provide an overview and explain how I implemented push notification for android versions 1.6+.

       Since we already established that I'm a n00b at everything (I dropped the hint in the Blog name btw) I set out on Google's Blue, Green, Yellow, and Red road to find the right assets for me and my current needs. My criteria was simplicity, reliability and speed. Simplicity because I want to release this app before I get out of High School, so while I would love to read and learn about new technologies it wouldn't fit the schedule. I wanted reliability because I didn't want to re write the whole app because I chose the wrong service; I would rather take my time choosing that waste my time switching services. And lastly I wanted Speed because frankly who likes to use slow, unresponsive apps?

       Still here? I'm surprised you care that much!...erhmm....right! backends...I happened to mention that I wanted push notifications. I basically want to avoid polling for anything. I'd Rather put a load on a server than on a user's phone. I couldn't use Android's C2DM because I would be leaving almost 30% of Android Users       without Push, so XMPP ( or Jabber for you old timers) seemed like the perfect match up for me. After all, C2DM is based off of XMPP! I just needed to copy it.

     I set out to make my own XMPP server and after numerous failed attempts I found this wonderful service called XTIFY. It was a blessing! Saved me a ton of work and I have not had a single dropped notification. Don't be fooled, while the site heavily pushes developers to use their pre-made Notification Activity you can send a "custom" notification with your own custom intent in it. Like so:

In XTIFY you can add your custom intent

And in your code add this:

Btw this is assuming you followed the implementation guide (which is fairly good!)

From this central Broadcast Receiver I can organize and send intents to other activities, write to databases and just treat this like a response from a server without having to deal with stupid http requests. That's going to come in the next part of this series ;)