通过主题将推送通知发送到所有设备

Question

I'm new to push notifications and here's what I understood so far -

1. Client app will need to register with Google Cloud Connection Server (GCCS).
2. GCCS will return a registration ID back to the client.
3. Client will send the device id and registration ID to the app server.
4. App server will store device & registration in its database. This database could get huge depending on the number users.
5. The app server in my case comprises of a single HTML page, and a node.js script. Admin will get to the page, types in a message and hits Send.
6. The app server will make a POST call to GCCS with the Sender ID, API Token, array of registration ID's etc.
7. Message is received by the devices.

There is also this thing called as Topics that the client apps can subscribe to. Using Topics, you do not have to send registration ID's of all devices. All devices "subscribed" to this Topic will get the message. This is very useful if you have millions of users (depending on the popularity of the app) and you don't have to split the registration ID's into chunks of 1000s to send the message.

My questions are -

1. If we're using Topics, do we need to persist the Registration ID, Device ID to a database on the App server? It seems redundant.
2. Are there any ready-to-use/commercial GCM servers that can send Topic messages?
3. Is it easy enough to build on your own (since its a simple POST call)? If I'm going to use JavaScript, wouldn't I run into CORS issue?

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

1. If we're using Topics, do we need to persist the Registration ID, Device ID to a database on the App server? It seems redundant.

Are you referring to C2DM implementations? Those are deprecated as shown on the GCM documentation . In relation to topics, they may not be necessary but are necessary to other message calls.

Based on the documentation, to needs to be set as topic/[yourTopic] with the necessary payload

https://gcm-http.googleapis.com/gcm/send
Content-Type:application/json
Authorization:key=AIzaSyZ-1u...0GBYzPu7Udno5aA

{
  "to": "/topics/foo-bar",
  "data": {
    "message": "This is a GCM Topic Message!",
   }
}

2. Are there any ready-to-use/commercial GCM servers that can send Topic messages?

I can't find any sources about this, so I'm guessing we're left to implement it on our own application server. Google provided us with a sandbox project for us to play with.

3. Is it easy enough to build on your own (since its a simple POST call)? If I'm going to use JavaScript, wouldn't I run into CORS issue?

If you're talking about setting up the Client App (specifically Android), there's a setup guide on the documentation . But if its more on the application server, I can't comment on it really. XMPP libraries can be used to handle XMPP Connection Servers