{"id":10917,"date":"2018-07-06T08:23:30","date_gmt":"2018-07-06T08:23:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/?p=10917"},"modified":"2018-07-06T08:24:01","modified_gmt":"2018-07-06T08:24:01","slug":"pusher-a-nice-solution-for-sending-messages-and-notifications-to-web-and-mobile-apps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/10917-pusher-a-nice-solution-for-sending-messages-and-notifications-to-web-and-mobile-apps.html","title":{"rendered":"Pusher: a nice solution for sending messages and notifications to web and mobile apps"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pusher<\/a> is a London company which runs cloud services for publish\/subscribe in web and mobile applications. The idea is to deliver real-time updates, a concept that has many use cases. Examples include price updates in finance apps, status updates to track a delivery, news updates, or anything where users want to monitor progress or keep in touch with fast-moving developments.<\/p>\n

The service passed my \u201cget up and running quickly\u201d test. I created a free account (limited to 100 connections and 200k messages per day) and a new channel:<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a> <\/p>\n

I\u2019m guessing it runs on AWS, looking at the datacentre locations:<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I chose a JavaScript client and ASP.NET MVC for the back end. On my PC I pasted the JavaScript into a web page running locally on Apache (in Windows Subsystem for Linux). I also created a new ASP.NET MVC project and added the sample code with some trivial modifications. I was able to send a message to the web page; it triggers an annoying alert but of course you could easily amend this to update the UI in more user-friendly ways.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course you could roll your own solution for this but what you get with Pusher is all the plumbing pre-done for many different clients and automatic scalability.<\/p>\n

Pusher also has a service called Beams (formerly Push Notifications) which lets you send notifications to Android and IOS apps.<\/p>\n

Pusher or roll your own? As with many cloud services, you are putting a high level of trust in Pusher (security and reliability) if you use the service, and you will need a paid subscription:<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You are saving considerable development time though, and as Google and Apple update their SDKs or change the rules, Pusher will presumably adapt accordingly.<\/p>\n

Can Azure easily do this, I wondered? I headed over to Azure Notification Hubs<\/a>. I noticed that the amount of admin you have to do to support each device is greater. Second, Microsoft promised<\/a> to support \u201cpush to web\u201d in March 2016:<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2026 but has not done so nor even bothered to update those asking:<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It is odd that Microsoft, with all its drive behind Azure, is still in the habit of leaving customers in the dark in certain areas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pusher is a London company which runs cloud services for publish\/subscribe in web and mobile applications. The idea is to deliver real-time updates, a concept that has many use cases. Examples include price updates in finance apps, status updates to track a delivery, news updates, or anything where users want to monitor progress or keep … Continue reading Pusher: a nice solution for sending messages and notifications to web and mobile apps<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10,19,26,1519,95],"tags":[645,1544],"class_list":["post-10917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-android","category-azure","category-cloud-computing","category-development","category-tech","category-web-2","tag-notifications","tag-pusher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10917"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10918,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10917\/revisions\/10918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}