[aerogear-dev] my experience with aerogear-android push

[Marc Sluiter]

Hi all,

I'm a Java and Android developer from Germany, Münster area. Matze pointed me to 
the aerogear-android framework and unified push, so I was curious and wanted to 
give it a try.
Until it worked I had some little issues, which I want to share, maybe it helps 
to improve documentation, and I was not sure if I should just start a pull 
request about it...

I started with forking and cloning aerogear-android, 
aerogear-unified-push-server and PushEEDemo to my local development environment.

For aerogear-android I followed the instructions on github and on 
http://aerogear.org/docs/guides/GetStartedAndroidIntellij/.
Worked nice, I even didn't have to uncomment the extra modules for the 
maven-android-sdk-deployer, after updating all libs in the Android SDK Manager 
it just worked.
The problem with "Could not find tool 'aapt'" was solved by updating the 
android-maven-plugin to version 3.6, so also no need to create a link to it. But 
then it was missing the platform version, so my pom looks like this now:

<plugin>
   <groupId>com.jayway.maven.plugins.android.generation2</groupId>
   <artifactId>android-maven-plugin</artifactId>
   <version>3.6.0</version>
   <configuration>
     <sdk>
       <platform>17</platform>
     </sdk>
     <undeployBeforeDeploy>true</undeployBeforeDeploy>
   </configuration>
   <extensions>true</extensions>
</plugin>

I also had to increase the version number of the support lib:

<dependency>
   <groupId>android.support</groupId>
   <artifactId>compatibility-v4</artifactId>
   <version>13</version>
</dependency>

Finally I had to add 2 lines in proguard.cfg in order to let maven build 
successfully:

-dontwarn android.support.**
-dontwarn com.google.android.gms.**


The aerogear-unified-push-server did run out of the box. But when I followed the 
instructions on http://aerogear.org/docs/specs/aerogear-server-push/, I always 
got something like "Authorization failed" when trying to register a push 
application. I found on the github page that I have to login and use cookies 
with the curl requests, with that it worked.
But then I got auth errors when the PushEEDemo app tried to register on the 
unified push server. Finally I got the hint from Matze to use the 
"quickstart-base" branch of the server, which skips authorization. With that I 
successfully sent a notification to my Nexus 4 :) Maybe it would useful to point 
to that branch in the docs.


Last but not least I wanted to test it on an older device with Android 2.3.7., 
for that I had to change the manifest of the PushEEDemo app. I already started a 
pull request about it (since it does not seem to be an official aerogear repo ;) 
): https://github.com/secondsun/PushEEDemo/pull/1. With that changes it worked, too.


When I have some time, I will have a look into the other features of Aerogear 
too, interesting project :)

Thx for reading this far & greetings,

Marc
@slintes