rabbit-pusher

Wrapper built on top of RabbitMQ to create android push services

Objectives

• Implement a cheap alternative for Push messaging in android faster than GCM because Pusher and PubNub are too expensive for a Startup
• Learn and have fun.

Project Structure

The project is structured as follows:

• RabbitMqTest: don't pay much attention to this project, it contains samples and experiments using the Java Client for RabbitMQ
• RabbitPushTestApp: this project has an Android project dependency with RabbitPusher, it contains a sample app that shows how to receive pushes. More info on this later.
• RabbitPusher: This is the important project, an Android library project, contains the actual code to receive pushes.
• RabbitPusherTest: this is the test project for RabbitPusher and RapidPushTestApp

Concepts

Although this project is a wrapper for RabbitMQ and knowledge of RabbitMQ internals are a good thing, you should not need to know about RabbitMQ to use rabbit-pusher

Channel

A channel is, similar to Parse's push channels or PubNub's channels a place where messages of a certain type are delivered. A subscriber can listen to many different channels.

Publisher

A publisher publishes messages into channels, these messages are delivered to any Subscriber listening on a specific channel

Subscriber

A subscriber can subscribe to several different channels, each of which will send him push messages.

Basics

This is a very basic tutorial to create a Subscriber that receives messages from a RabbitMQ server.
First things first, in your AndroidManifest.xml add the following lines

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"/>

and

<service android:name="your_package_name.SubscriberService"></service>

Now lets create the Service that receives the messages. To do this we must extend RabbitReaderService (which extends IntentService). For a very basic implementation you can just copy-paste the following:

public class SubscriberService extends RabbitReaderService {

	@Override
	public void onConnectionSuccessful() {
		Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), "connection successful", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
	} 

	@Override
	public void onConnectionLost() {
		Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), "connection failed", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
	}

	@Override
	public void onMessageReceived(String message) {
		sendBroadcast(MessageReceiver.getBroadcastIntent(message, getApplicationContext()));
	}

	@Override
	public String getChannelName() {
		return Constants.CHANNEL;
	}

	@Override
	public String getHostName() {
		return Constants.HOST_NAME;
	}

	@Override
	public boolean running() {
		return true;
	}

}

the most important thing to do here is to notice the onMessageReceived. This method is executed whenever a push arrives, in this case we are broadcasting the received message to a broadcast receiver called MessageReceiver, but you could do whatever you want

To start the service use

startService(new Intent(getApplicationContext(), SubscriberService.class));