Making Android chat application from scratch - php

I need to make chat application for android. I thought of using PHP script to implement the chat application. Basic idea is to send message form android client to PHP script and making use of PHP script send the messages to the MySQL database. These messages will be broadcasting to other people. But the problem is auto broadcasting messages to other people. Is there a way to do this using android and php?

You can do the following
Make a persistent tcp connection between your device and the PHP server
When a message is broadcast send it over the tcp connection of each device
On the device process this notification and you are good to go.
If you want to use Java on the server side I have your project already finished and ready to ship ;) (just kidding)
But if you are interested check out the Device-To-Device messaging framework of OpenMobster Mobile Cloud platform. The project is free and open source. Here is a link to the Device-To-Device Framework: http://code.google.com/p/openmobster/wiki/D2DPushFramework
and http://code.google.com/p/openmobster/wiki/PushFramework
The above three steps are already taken care of by the framework. The developer just has to focus on the App itself
Good Luck!!!!

Yes there is several ways to do this
you can just post to the server and from the server send push notifications to the mobiles
You can make the mobile keep checking for updates if it exists

You will require to finish these steps ( at least ):
setup a PHP web server
register for Android Push Notification (you probably need that)
create database schema
write your own codes to allow users to submit & retrieve chat messages
security !!!

You'd probably want to use Google's C2DM, though it's not free.
Your php server would get a message from a phone, do it's processing, then make a HTTPS request to Google's C2DM service, which sends the messages to the destination android device.
http://code.google.com/android/c2dm/#push-process

Don't use C2DM, its a deprecated. Please go through the GCM(Global Cloud Messaging),
please follow this link,
http://developer.android.com/google/gcm

Have you heard of Firebase? Firebase. Making a chat app with Firebase is like eating pizza.

Related

Send commands from a server to swift app

I am new to swift and was wondering how could I send commands from a server to my iOS application ? For example imagine a website where I can click a button and that button would then trigger a pop up to all users of my app. Is this possible and if so can someone lead me in the right direction?
Much appreciated
Yes, you can
Silent Push Notification: Send a Silent Push Notification and handle in your app. But you need user permissions to receive Notifications. Add "content-available" : 1 to your notification content.
Using Sockets: There are many options to create connection b/w device and server. example: https://socket.io/
It depends what you are trying to do, you might want to look at apple push notifications and see how they work. From there I would suggest looking into sending notifications to the apple server (that would send the push notifications to the app). I hope this sends you in the right path good luck!
I just assume that you have an application that a number of users are using and you have a web application that can show all mobile users.
For the most of cases, whenever a user is using the application, you let the application send a request with your user's information to your server and your server records the user information in the database.
When your website wants to show all the users' information, it just fetches all the information from the database instead of sending sort of commands to all applications to get information in real-time.
Of course, there is a more complex way to send commands to all running applications to get the results. However, it requires both server-side and client-side (ios application) implement functions sending commands in real-time using Socket or MQTT etc. This is more complex and it requires iOS application running in front or background at the same time.
I assume that using HTTP to record every mobile user is more suitable for your case.

Do I need to make 2 different applications for using GCM in android?

I tried searching these issues. Some sites say I need to do some stuff with php in order to make 3rd party server while others don't mention anything. some says it need JSON. Guide me please. PS I am a beginner and know java, XML,SQL only.
You should only need one server. The second server you are reading about may be the Google GCM cloud server? When I did a GCM project a few years ago, I had one server, it happened to be a App Engine instance. It generated events and sent them to Google via the GCM api and then onto onto the device. I don't remember it being that difficult.
I did have more than one server in the mix though, there were others that sent messages to the AppEngine server, but it was not required to send a GCM message.
Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) is a service that enables developers to send data from servers to both Android applications or Chrome apps and extensions.
So if you want to send data to the users of your App then you must have an interface or dashboard from where you can send some data (typically push notification) to the users of your app.
This dashboard (server from which you can send data) can be developed by using PHP or any script languages.
Now a though can come up in your mind:
"I am suppose to develop both the mobile app and the server then what
role does GCM play?"
Yes, GCM is playing a vital role indeed. The server we have to develop is just to design an interface so that you can type your message/notification and select the recipients. Rest of the part of (managing the queue, communication with the apps checking for authentication and all other stuffs will be done by mighty GCM )
In order to have an bird-eye overview you can take a look on this image collected form android hive
Server side coding is doesn't need you to be expert in php. So you can go through to this article. It helped me a lot to learn.

How can i get data to be pushed from the database to the client, like a messenger service?

I am trying to code a messenger service that will store sent messages in a server and then push the message to all devices connected to the server.
The messenger will be used in a classroom environment and the messages will never be sent to one individual device. At the moment a message can be sent and stored in the database but the app needs to be refreshed for all the messages to be displayed. A simple way would be to continuously run the stored procedure but that would require extra bandwidth and i'm sure there is a better way to do it.
I am currently coding in Android Studio and I'm using MySQL as my database and PHP for my stored procedures. I am very new at Java and this type of coding so any help will be appreciated.
Thanks
Yes, what you are suggesting is named "polling" => check if the server has some updates each 10sec or something like that. You're right, it's evil (drains the battery, use a lot of bad=ndwidth, etc.)
What you need is a "push" service. If you are working with Android, the easiest way of doing it is to use GCM (Google Cloud Messaging) : http://developer.android.com/google/gcm/index.html
This little guy will provide you a way of notifying all the devices that theure have been some changes on the server.
It's pretty well done (if it can't reach the devices, it will try again with an exponential time delay, etc.).
You can use google cloud messaging service to send notification in device so please register your application on google service all step are cover below link.
Open below link and follow step
http://www.androidhive.info/2012/10/android-push-notifications-using-google-cloud-messaging-gcm-php-and-mysql/

whats the best way to implement real time push messages with apache, php and mysql only?

i'm trying to implement a chat application for android (where users can communicate people who are in same location). i'm thinking it of an facebook messenger with Geo specific oriented. i came across to terms like repeated pull, comet, bosh, websockects, socket programming, xmpp(which requires xmpp capable server like openfire) etc to do this. But my resources are fixed like apache, php (codeignter) and MySql only. I need to find the efficient to way to do this. Guys i need this. Please help me.
Thank you,
abbiya
The preferred approach on Android is Google Cloud Messaging.
Google Cloud Messaging for Android (GCM) is a service that allows you
to send data from your server to your users' Android-powered device.
This could be a lightweight message telling your app there is new data
to be fetched from the server (for instance, a movie uploaded by a
friend), or it could be a message containing up to 4kb of payload data
(so apps like instant messaging can consume the message directly).
The GCM service handles all aspects of queueing of messages and
delivery to the target Android application running on the target
device. GCM is completely free no matter how big your messaging needs
are, and there are no quotas.
Essentially, it works like this: Your server talks to Google, and Google pushes the message in real-time (or nearly so, as long as the device is powered on and connected to the Internet) to the Android device(s). There's a registration process that happens on the Android device the first time the app is installed (and at future points to revalidate the registration). In your Android app, it's your responsibility to send this registration ID to your server so you can store it for future use. Your server uses this registration ID when it wants to push a message to that device.
The communication protocol between your server and Google is JSON over HTTPS. Your server can use any languages/technologies, as long as it can communicate with Google's servers. A PHP/MySQL application can definitely meet the basic requirements for the service:
Before you can write client Android applications that use the GCM
feature, you must have an application server that meets the following
criteria:
Able to communicate with your client.
Able to fire off HTTPS requests to the GCM server.
Able to handle requests and resend then as needed, using exponential back-off.
Able to store the API key and client registration IDs.
On the client side, the Android device must be running API version 8 (Android 2.2) or later. Of course, it's also your Android app's responsibility to process incoming messages (using a BroadcastReceiver, as the Android system sends an Intent to your receiver whenever a message arrives), which allows you to handle messages however you want.

Openfire and push notifications

I am writing an IOS app that is basically a jabber chat app. I am using Openfire for the xmpp server and so far its been great. The problem I am facing now is with push notifications. The app is written in Xcode which gets user data from a PHP Api. Openfire is the xmpp server. The issue is that when the app sends a message to openfire I would need to also query the Php api to see if the user is online and if they are not, send a push notification. This would have to happen for each message sent and as you might guess that will affect performance with all those requests happening.
I have everything working, I just cant get past this hump. If only openfire would fife off a request of my choice upon receiving a message.
Can anyone suggest a better idea? Basically need to know if the user is online (presence) before so that I know to fire off the push notification and I dont want to fire off two requests from my app per message sent. Thanks.
In openfire the messages to offline users are stored in ofoffline table. So your php code neednot worry about the status of the user if der is any entry in the ofOfline table it means the user was offline. Now create a scheduler that will keep looking in the ofOfline table for offline messages club them together and push notification to the user
i have spen lots of time for in XAMPPHP Library but cant find any proper solution. so for develop a web base chat application with jabber server. rather than using XAMPPHP, you can use "http://strophe.im/strophejs/" it will be much faster than XAMPPHP and you can find more js plugin for Strophe js. and you can also find more ready made xmpp client base on strophe js. so it will better than XAMPHP.

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