Push to Android, iOS, WP8 and FFOS - All at Once with AeroGear

Supported Push Networks

AeroGear UnifiedPush Server is extremely useful in situations where you want a single server responsible for managing and watching over push notifications sent to multiple platforms. UnifiedPush server supports as of today…

iOS (APNS)
Android (GCM)
Windows Phone (WPS, MPNS*)
Firefox OS (Simple Push)

*) MPNS is already developed, but not released yet

Building Whats Up? chat application in < 20 minutes

I believe there is never enough chat applications available in mobile app stores, so I decided to build a small Push Notifications based message exchange app. ;-)

In the following screenshare I will take you from initializing new application to the deployment and use on actual mobile devices, all that in less than 20 minutes!

The summary of the highlighted steps follows:

Cordova + Ionic

In order to start a new app, one has to just:

ionic start myapp blank

Then, you can add support to all required platforms:

cordova platform add android ios wp8 firefoxos

(Note that you will actually need at least two operating systems to build the project locally - I used virtualized environment.)

Installing Cordova Push Plugin

And don’t forget to register a UnifiedPush plugin:

cordova plugin install org.jboss.aerogear.cordova.push

Let’s create a push-config.json (*) and populate it with the definitions for all variants that you:

*) push-config.json is another sneak peak - feature that is developed but not released yet

{
    pushServerURL: "http://myapp-mydomain.rhcloud.com/ag-push/",
    android: {
        senderID: "315466463870",
        variantID: "988971c5-82c8-4232-91a2-083394addf29",
        variantSecret: "8283a07f-0736-4205-b6e9-ac7e1eea29c0"
    },
    ios: {
        variantID: "8d4adf84-12a7-405f-8489-399baaf2d995",
        variantSecret: "2f77047c-e420-44da-945c-b7d8d5280a36"
    },
    firefoxos: {
        variantID: "5c328ffd-7157-40df-9ac3-1758837fb911",
        variantSecret: "baa74aad-d8e5-4069-a66a-970a4db399c1"
    },
    windows: {
        variantID: "b3ddb379-9397-4753-86d7-d667c13df341",
        variantSecret: "9787773a-938b-4334-bf89-f17a13c2665b"
    }
}

Finally, you need to register for receiving Push Notifications by invoking the plugin API and providing 3 handlers:

push.register( onNotification, successHandler, errorHandler );

I can’t imagine there could be anything simpler for cross-platform mobile development than Cordova and cross-platform Push Notifications than UnifiedPush Server.

You can find a complete guide to setting everything up in AeroGear Cordova Push Plugin documentation.