Testing Deacon on Devices « The Deacon Project

9Dec/102

Testing Deacon on Devices

Around this time of the year, it's not uncommon (in many Western nations, at least) to hear songs about a certain saint of Christmas who's "making a list, and checking it twice". The Deacon Project has kicked off a list of its own, but rather than keeping track of kids' shenanigans, this one tracks how well various Android devices play with the Deacon push notifications library. Without further ado...

The Deacon Device Testing List

The goal of the Device Testing List is to catalog the results of developers testing Deacon on their devices. There are a lot of Android devices on the market, in different form factors, with different software versions and manufacturer/carrier customizations. Deacon is designed to avoid dependence on any one device's capabilities or OS version - a strong ally in the fight against fragmentation. Nonetheless, the Deacon team can't possibly test the library in all the different hardware/software environments where it might be used. Such testing can reveal bugs and help improve Deacon - so I'm hopeful that those who are running Deacon-powered apps on the spectrum of Android devices will log their results on the Device Testing List.

Keep an eye on the list as we develop the format and add devices. So far, only the devices that I have personally tested appear - but I hope that the Deacon community changes that quickly!

Note: As far as I can tell, you just need a GitHub account to edit the Deacon Wiki, which hosts the Device Testing List. If anyone has trouble making edits, please let me know by comments or e-mail!

About Dave

Dave Rea is an upstate-NY engineer specializing in embedded systems. He holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering and a MS degree in Software Engineering, both from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Dave is an open-source enthusiast, totes an HTC Droid Incredible, and runs Ubuntu Linux. You can find more on Dave at daverea.com or LinkedIn.

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Nagaraj Ramarao
December 17th, 2010 - 21:17

Dave,
I would like to use Deacon in my project can you point me to a tutorial or user guide doc? I am new to the PUSH server based development. My current app uses REST based remote webservice. The webservice is hosted on a Tomcat server. As one of the service is time consuming operation I am planning on using a Push Notification. I need some help with this and after going over all the messages have decided to try Deacon.
Please let me know if this is feasible. If so please point me to a tutorial.

Thanks in advance

Nagaraj
Dave
December 18th, 2010 - 11:48

Hi Nagaraj-

The Deacon API documentation is available at http://www.deaconproject.org/api/ and there is a short, easy video tutorial (starring me!):

It sounds like your application could certainly employ Deacon’s push notifications for mobile device notification. I recommend that a “token”, such as a UUID or some other reference number, be passed via the Meteor notification. There is more information available in this post on Push Notification security. You should try to keep the processing-intensive operations of your application on the server, and using push notifications can reduce how frequently you need to run those operations.

If you need more help, I’d suggest you join the Deacon Mailing List at http://www.deaconproject.org/mailing-list so that your questions, and their answers, are available to all.

Best Regards,
Dave