On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Apostolos Emmanouilidis <aemmanou@redhat.com> wrote:
I received some feedback for the aerogear-unifiedpush-server.

The case is:

Company X would like to create a personalized push notifications campaign for Y hundred thousands customers/clients. Personalized means that each client/device should receive a unique message. The messages are automatically produced from rules defined in a CRM system, but this is something which doesn't affect our implementation.

Currently, our selective send method is able to send one message to a selected list of clients. In cases like the above one, this translates into Y hundred thousands calls of the aerogear-unifiedpush-server selective send method. The question is whether we could change the signature of the selective send method and allow to pass an array of messages or not.

In my understanding, the advantages/disadvantages of a such change are similar to the advantages/disadvantages of a service according its level of granularity.

This is indeed an interesting use case ! And as you said we should really consider the impact of sending an huge message ( + UPS refactoring) Vs Sending hundred thousands messages. 

But considering "the big send" option and thinking aloud, even if it the messages are personalized, probably most of the message will be identical with just some variables changing. We could have a message template, and the map of clients (alias in UPS terminology) would contain values for variables, pseudo code : 

{"message":"You won <amount> with this <stock>","alias":{["bob":{"amount"=50,"stock"="Shell"} , "john":{"amount"=120,"stock"="Esso"}]}

This will limit the size of the "big send" but implies some logic processing on the UPS side which is maybe not the best idea (even if this templating is generic and not related to any business logic). 


Fine Grained
+ simplicity and less business logic on server side
+ less amount of data exchanged between client/server
- a lot of interactions between client/server
- more interactions = more network overhead
- complex client side
Why ?  

Coarse Grained
+ less interactions between client/server
+ less network overhead & possibility of re-using the same network connection to send messages to the Push Networks (at least for APN)
+ simple client side
- much data exchanged in each interaction between client/server
- complex server side

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