[aerogear-dev] Pushing into the Open

[Kris Borchers]

In the interest of keeping things open and not working in a black box, Dan, Matthias and myself would like to give a quick update on some of the push related work we have been doing and continue to do. We are still very much in the PoC phase and are trying to get some working examples going for everyone's review. In the meantime, here is where we are.

Unified Push

Matthias has done a lot of work on a PoC for a Unified Push server which will allow for sending push messages (iOS and Android based native push as well as web push) to clients. Currently, this is done via a REST based interface that allows for sending a single message payload to an endpoint which is then disseminated to the registered client devices/browsers.

SimplePush

In the Unified Push section, I mentioned the ability to send push notifications to web based clients as well as native. As I'm sure most of you are aware, this isn't really possible ... yet. Mozilla has been working on a SimplePush[1] API spec which will allow native-like push messaging in broswer-based applications. They are currently close to a first implementation landing in FirefoxOS with plans for it to land in Desktop and Mobile Firefox later this year. Without going into too much detail, this looks really promising and so we have decided to start working on both a client library which would act as a pollyfill for the native browser functionality, not only in Firefox but all browsers including mobile, and a SimplePush Server which would act as sort of the push "network" which Firefox is providing for its native implementation. We started out with a client implementation that acted less like a pollyfill and more like a piece of AeroGear.js which isn't a bad thing, but didn't seem as useful. I have rewritten it to follow the spec and am much happier with where it is so far. Dan has been pulled in to start working on the SimplePush server bits and his early work looks promising as well. Our goal to start with is to get a few of the basics in place, like doing the SimplePush handshake/hello, registering channels, and then handling push notifications to the registered channels. This will all be a lot easier to explain when we have examples to show, and we hope to have something soon, hopefully in the next week or so.

The three of us are really excited about the possibilities here and hope we can get you all just as excited. Stay tuned as we will be keeping everyone up to date here on the mailing list as we progress.

Thanks!
Dan, Matthias and Kris

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/SimplePush