Tuesday, March 27, 2012

PubNub: Real time push made easy

PubNub is a product for developers to implement real time push notifications easy.

You might have been doing real time messaging for a long time and wonder what's with PubNub? Yup, if you don't use PubNub, you can still do real time messaging be using XMPP or jabber technology.

However, with PubNub, you can do away with setting up your XMPP server and worry about max connection per thread etc.. PubNub makes it easy to use for your server and client side.

Like all cloud service, this comes with a fee. It is free if you send 1 million messages per month (similar to UrbanAirship/Xtify). Otherwise, pay $15 per month and additional $1 for each 1 million messages.


Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Embed Chat Client Into Your iPhone App

Mobile app developers love to engage their users.

If you are one of them, and looking for a chat client SDK that can be used to embed into your mobile app, then you have to check out QuickBlox. The service is not free.

An alternative is Airgram, which offer a standalone app to engage your mobile users.


Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Xtify is like Urban Airship

Xtify is another webservice for Push Notifications. Similar to Urban Airship, but Xtify seems to position themselves more than just that.

Xtify provides their portal with more control and rules to send out (automated) push notifications. Their slogan is "Mobile Customer Engagement", not just push.

However, sometimes all you want is a simple web service for Push, that is where Urban Airship is more suitable.

The pricing structure for both are fairly similar.

Standard for SMS/Network API

GSMA does have a mandate on how network APIs should be designed.

For example, this is what they mandated for SMS Restful API.

AFAIK, Simplified does follow the "rules". But does it do any good?

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Java Framework for Creating RESTful API

Dropwizard is a Java framework for developing ops-friendly, high-performance, RESTful web services.

It is developed by Yammer, and is using matured a couple of matured Java libraries to get it to work. It is a out-of-the-box framework, including a Jetty HTTP web server.

And its open-sourced.

Monday, March 5, 2012

Photo Infrastructure - Chute API

If you have ever dealt with photos (or media files) for your website or mobile apps, you know how difficult it is to store, resize, crop, etc..

Chute API is a infrastructure as a service, specifically for photos! Check out the documentation here. They are currently in beta, and is free to use, though they will charge for additional features in the future.