A Push Notifications platfom for mobile apps with jBackend

Since version 3, jBackend introduced support for push notifications for Android and iOS, providing all needed functions to manage multiple mobile apps, to register devices and to send scheduled push notifications. The following video shows how to use jBackend to create a new application, to call the push register service to register a device, and the schedule and trigger a push notification.

Create the mobile app

The first step is to create an app item from jBackend manager. From the Apps menu, add new app, and insert the app code. This will be used by the mobile app to identify itself during the registration of the token. Project ID, Project number and API key are related to Android platform (GCM), while the SSL certificate and its Password are related to iOS platform (APNs).

Register a device

Once a mobile app installed on a device register successfully on its Platform Service (GCM or APNs) and receives the registration token, it should send this token to the application's platform that will use the token to send push notification on this device through the Platform Service. jBackend provides a Push Module that exposes a register service for this purpose. The registration request to call from the mobile app is something like:

http://www.support4joomla.com/jbackend/rest/put/push/register?token=0987654321&appcode=jbackapp&platform=android

Where is possible to identify the three mandatory params to send, the registration token, the app code, and the current platform.

Create a push notification

To schedule a push notification for sending, from the Notifications menu, add new notification, and insert notification title and message (in the next versions other push properties will be added to jBackend). The notification must be targeted on a single app and a specific platform (context will be used in the next versions to add more filtering options to delivery notifications only on subsets of registered devices). Finally a scheduled time must be set (the sending process will not start before that time). Now the push notification is ready (scheduled state).

Trigger the scheduler

The final step of this push tour is to start the sending process. This can be triggered calling another service of the Push Module, something like

http://www.support4joomla.com/jbackend/rest/get/push/scheduler

This request starts the delivery process and up to N notifications are sent, where N can be configured with the Batch size option of the Push Module. In the video you can see that push sending fails because, of course, we registered a fake device.

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