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Re: kicking off: the plan so far

 

On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 3:26 PM, John Lenton <john.lenton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 2:20 PM, Robert Park <robert.park@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> > Yes, there's something I'm unclear on: What kind of notifications are we
> > even talking about? Is this limited to dbus or similar local IPC? Or does
> > this also include notifications from the network, such as new mail or
> > notifications from social networks?
>
> app writers send notifications to a server, the server delivers the
> notification to the device, the device shows the notification to the
> user (possibly by starting the app). So it's for things like new mail,
> notifications from social networks, click package update
> notifications, system image update notifications, etc.
>

Ok, and when you say "server", do you mean "a daemon running on the phone"
or do you mean "an internet server running in canonical's data center"?

I'm asking as the author of Friends, which is the default Ubuntu social
networking client since the start of the raring cycle, and I'm unsure how
this impacts me. Is your server going to be a drop-in replacement for
libnotify, or am I going to have to re-architect most of Friends in order
to accomodate this new notification system? Our current architecture is to
poll social networks every 15 minutes (by default) and then display
notifications to the user "immediately" (immediately after we discover them
in 15m intervals, not immediately after they happen) using libnotify.

I know Twitter has the ability to deliver push notifications to clients,
but we've never been able to take advantage of those due to the polling
nature of our architecture (we don't have a daemon that stays in memory to
receive the pushed notifications; our backend is started every 15 minutes
by dbus invocation, does it's poll, and then exits, due to memory
contraints). Is this the kind of thing you're aiming to solve or am I
misunderstanding your goals?

Thanks.

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