I'm trying to make a whatsapp like chat app, where I want a server to receive requests. I am thinking of making php server page. Would it be the right choice? or should i look for some cloud computing servers? Please convey some opinion..
You should have a look at socket.io, which is a websocket package for nodejs. In its documentation there is a chat server example.
http://socket.io/get-started/chat/
I would recommend you to use NodeJs in this case. Node has a asynchronous nature, so its the best thing to use for chat apps. Its also a lot faster than PhP in most use cases. Another thing to consider is that NodeJS hosting is pretty cheap. In fact, you can use OpenShift and start testing your app for free in a redhat server.
If you wanna know more about nodejs: http://www.nodejs.org
More on Openshift: openshift.redhat.com
If you are creating a chat app like Whatsapp, use the following server that would help to build more easily.
Yaws - An Erlang-based web server that can also run as a standalone web server
Lighttpd - Another web server that is highly secure, swift, flexible and compliant with web server standards.
Related
I am new to mobile applications. I am basically from a web development platform. I am just playing around mobile frameworks like App Framework, LungoJS, Jquery Mobile, kendo etc to gain some knowledge in this vertical.
The app I am developing is still in UI level. All I need is to fetch data from the server and populate in my app.
I need some ideas to establish server communication between the smart device and the server. My questions are
What kind of server needed for mobile applications ? A cloud or a
regular web server is enough ?
What are the ways to connect the app with the server ? ( on cross
platform mobile development )
What is the secure way to communication with the server ?
What kind of server needed for mobile applications ? A cloud or a regular web server is enough ?
Because you are creating a hybrid mobile application you can use any type of server side technology, it doesn't matter is it a classic web server technology (using Java, PHP or .NET) or some kind of cloud technology like Parse.com.
You also don't need to create anything from scratch. Best course of action would be to use some kind of micro RESTFul framework(like PHP Falcon or Java Play Framework). Read more about them here.
But, there's always a but. You can't use server side technology for classic content generation, you only need to use it to send data to your hybrid application. I will explain this later.
There's also an alternative to RESTFul services, you can create a webservice, again using Java, PHP or .NET.
What are the ways to connect the app with the server ? ( on cross platform mobile development )
You would use AJAX as a technology (in case of RESTFul), rest depends on you. You would probably do it in JSON format (or JSONP if you are doing cross-domain calls, but you don't need to think about JSONP when creating a hybrid application).
If you intend to use a web service then you would use a SOAP connection and communicate via XML format.
No matter which server side technology you use you will always use AJAX on a client side.
Now let me tell you why you should not generate your content on server side. Basically nothing can prevent you from doing that, you can generate your complete page on web server and just show it in PhoneGap app, it would still be a hybrid app. But, if you try to put this app in Apple store you will get yourself rejected.
What is the secure way to communication with the server ?
Security of course depends on server side technology. Every framework has its own kind of security handling, but all of them relay on HTTPS so you should not worry too much.
From the client side you can always encrypt JSON/XML data and send them using POST.
Examples:
If you want to use jQuery Mobile then take a look at this tutorial. It will show you basics of client - server side communication.
Since you are new to mobile application, ill try to give short answers
1) What kind of server needed for mobile applications ? A cloud or a regular web server is enough ?
A regular web server is good.
2) What are the ways to connect the app with the server ?
via web-services
3) What is the secure way to communication with the server ?
Use HTTPS webservices (SOAP, REST), HTTPS secures the transmission.
Above is a basic explanation for your quick help, I would recommend you to go through the documentation, and review some sample codes
This will really help you Sample
Please go through this link it will surely help you
http://www.androidhive.info/2012/01/android-login-and-registration-with-php-mysql-and-sqlite/
Webserver,cloud anything is good for restful service
for security purpose you can use POST parameter to send and recieve data or if you want more security then you can encrypt and decrypt data through secure algorithm
I'm posting this here because the thread I made on programmers stackexchange didn't get any answer and I need an answer for this rather fast, so here we go:
For a school project we are looking to implement push like technologies in our Android app, we need to send push messages from a server (Tomcat) to the Phone (Android).
After doing some research I've found that XMPP would be a good option for achieving this type of push notifications, now my problem is how I should integrate this with our Tomcat server where all the information and events will happen as well as where all our other pages are.
Is it at all possible to have a XMPP server or module running inside of Tomcat or can I build my own lightweight module(I was thinking something like a servlet) to handle this?
If you have any better ideas on how to achieve push notifications I would be really glad to hear them, whether it be using a totally different approach then XMPP (I've looked at long polling, MQTT and some other things) or some other way to integrate the solution into Tomcat.
The requirements we have is that we must use Tomcat and Android 2.1 (so C2DM is not an option) and set up push notifications between these.
You can probably run some servers within Tomcat, but I don't think you really gain anything from this setup with respect to XMPP. You will in effect have a server running inside of another server.
The only advantage I can see with this is if you want access to the server internals from some other web application, but for that I would either make the web app another client, or build a custom communication module in the xmpp server that the web app can use to communicate outside of standard XMPP.
I am trying to develop a system that involves a:
server with a database that will handle the system's logic and manipulate data
an android app that will interact with that server (pull and push data into the server)
a website that will do the same as the android app, but from a website with slightly different data.
What I thought of is to use SQLite with Apache Tomcat installed on the server and deploy a Grails war file on it. That will take care of the 'website' side of the system. But what about the android app? Can it communicate with Tomcat as well?
Tomcat will suit your needs. I would look at hosting options though. Are you hosting your own server, or do you have a hosting provider? Do you have experience hosting a tomcat server etc. Do you have experience with java web applications, or other web frameworks? All of the above, and probably more should lead you to your decision on what type of framework/language to use on the server. This in turn will lead you to your options for hosting, and web-container to use.
Once that is determined all major web frameworks will allow you to publish web-services Rest, Soap, etc. that can be consumed by an android application.
Also, if you are planning on providing a web interface and service at the server level, my guess is you are going to be storing a fair amount of data, I would look into a more robust and scalable database such as mysql or postgres. This post contains some insights into this.
If you have an API that is web accessible, an Android can access it.
Android shouldn't have any problems communicating with Tomcat.
Look at http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/13.%20Web%20Services.html for more information.
A RESTful web service is most likely what you'll need. Android can consume SOAP web services but it requires more work for less overall functionality.
I'm planning on constructing a large application. It will have a browser based interface along with a mobile application interface (iOS, Android, blackberry).
I would like to be able to push data from the server onto these interfaces, and there will be a lot of data being sent from the mobile apps back to the server. So my question is what kind of server am I looking to build.
I'm a PHP developer mainly, though I can write in Java and have dabbled in others. I'm fine with learning a new language. My thoughts as a PHP developer is that I could just build a PHP application and use it's API to power the other interfaces.
However there will be a lot of data moving around and I don't feel like PHP would be the best base for this really. So I'm exploring alternatives. Any thoughts on where to start with this?
you can use a framework like Rhomobile's Rhodes that generates your browser based clients and they also offer a server component: http://rhomobile.com/products/rhosync/
Common practice would be to separate out the backend functionality between different servers.
Server 1: serve up your static content
Server 2: serve up your dynamically generated content (things based on queries that require IO such as DB interaction
Server 3: dedicated realtime infrastructure for the realtime push functionality
Server 1 & 2 could probably be the same server for now but I'd recommend having a dedicated realtime server. Communication between servers is normally done with some sort of message queue although web service calls are also an option.
My area of interest is realtime push so here's a bit more information on that. If you want to stick with PHP there's the phpwebsocket project. If you want to look at Java then there's [WaterSpout}(http://www.spoutserver.com/), jwebsocket and Jetty which has been around for a while and is (or was the last time I checked) used by the Twitter Streaming API.
There are more options for the realtime component of your solution on this Realtime technologies guide which I'm maintaining.
I need to implement an http server which accepts requests from android devices. To give a brief idea, this server will contain a location based game, and multiple android devices can access this game which is stored on the server. The server will also handle messages sent via mobile devices. can you give me some tips or links of articles/tutorials which might help me in this task?
Any server can make this stuff. It depends on what programming language are you using on server-side. I don't know what language you know but I usually use ruby on rails. If you use rails, then you can use heroku for a quick and fast server to implement. But it depends on your language.
I wouldn't use HTTP as a game server protocol.
Take a look at Apache Mina. It's an Java, event based framework. I recommend the "new line" protocol.