Projects

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As an unrepentant geek, it’s practically a prerequisite that I have my fingers into all sorts of projects. This page is a place to list a few of them…

Deacon: Push Notifications for Android Phones

If you’ve read much of the rest of this web site, you know I’m a pretty big fan of the Android smartphone OS. But sadly, there are a few ways that Android lags behind other smartphone systems, and push notifications is one of them. Push notifications are messages sent from a central server to your phone, without requiring your phone to constantly poll the server for updates (this consumes battery power and is a waste of network bandwidth). I started the Deacon project to create a native push notification system for the Android platform. The project didn’t start from scratch, though; we have the fine folks at the Meteor Server Project to thank for providing a highly-capable and flexible backend server to deliver notifications to our client.

The Deacon Project started in April, 2010. You can check out the project’s Blog, pay a visit to the source code on GitHub, or read up on the details in the project wiki.

ReqProTo

Agile software engineering processes often call for frequent delivery of finished software for customer evaluations – and sometimes, in the very early stages of a project, these deliveries can be in the form of prototypes or mockups. There are some great prototyping systems out there (example: Mockflow) but the Software Engineering department at RIT decided they wanted a system that could track textual requirement and link them with the visual elements of the prototype. The ReqProTo Project was born – as a graduate practicum project for me and six other master’s degree candidates during the 2009-2010 academic year. Upon completion, the ReqProTo system is expected to be used to help 2nd- and 3rd-year SE students do requirements management during their first SE methodology courses (like the famous SE361).

Comments
  • Shivan:

    Dave.
    I would like experiment with the Deacon api push notifications for android using meteor server. Want to get the push notifications for stock quotes. Got a java api to talk to the stock tick server. How do i integrate the java application (which connects to the tick server) with the meteor server from which we get the push notifications? I mean meteor server should act as a client to the tick server using my java api. Any ideas?
    Thanks.

    Reply January 29, 2011 at 9:24 am
    • dave:

      Hello Shivan – Push notifications are sent to Meteor using an “event controller” protocol documented on their web site: http://meteorserver.org/server-docs/ … look for the section titled “Event controller command protocol” about 3/4 of the way down. It sounds like in your application, you would need a script running in-between the stock tick server and Meteor that would convert the incoming stock tick messages into the Meteor event controller format. This is a very simple format, so the middleware would likely be easy to implement. Good luck!

      If you have any further questions, please feel free to join the Deacon mailing list at http://www.deaconproject.org/mailing-list

      Reply January 29, 2011 at 2:22 pm
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