[jdev] XMPP on Android, Round #2

[Stephen Pendleton]

-----Original Message-----
From: jdev-bounces at jabber.org [mailto:jdev-bounces at jabber.org] On Behalf Of
René Treffer
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2010 8:56 PM
To: jdev at jabber.org
Subject: [jdev] XMPP on Android, Round #2

>Hi,

>It's been some time since my last posting. But I didn't stop thinking 
>about XMPP on Android devices. I've always been unhappy with asmack, 
>because it's sort of a hack. It does solve a problem, mainly to reduce 
>the amount of code to be written. But it doesn't solve the problem of 
>nice phone integration. We've ended up with many jabber apps on Android, 
>but none that's as native as e.g. a GTalk service.

Very impressive work! I have done a few XMPP implementations on Android
using a similar architecture (remote service+intents for stanza event
notifications). I will look to switching to this implementation.

One thing I think is missing from XMPP Android (and battery constrained
devices in general) is the ability to re-establish a data connection only
when an interesting event occurs when the application is in the background.
In this case, an interesting event would be that a chat message, or other
interesting stanza, arrived for me at the server. 

For example, 95% of the time I am not actively interested in my XMPP app or
want to maintain a data connection to my XMPP server but am running my XMPP
app in the background on my phone. I only bring it to the foreground when I
want to send a message or to read a message. For the former, the XMPP app
will re-connect to the XMPP server when I am ready to send my message. For
the latter case the google cloud push service
(http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/05/android-cloud-to-device-mess
aging.html) could be employed to notify my client that a message exists for
me on the server. When I am ready to read it the XMPP app will re-connect
and fetch the message for me. 

This would require a server component, and also a addition to the android
service that could process these messages. Do you have any interest in
implementing this idea on the client service side?

Thanks