[SailfishDevel] Push Service for Sailfish OS

[Thomas B. Rücker]

On 02/07/2016 12:45 PM, r0kk3rz wrote:
> I wouldn't bet on Jolla hosting such a thing, this was raised by a
> community member some time ago and afaik Jolla didn't show any interest.

To clarify, there was interest, but only as far as observing my research
into this subject. Given that they constantly had and will have far too
much on their plate and are severely cash limited, this is not that
surprising. A working push service probably never was enough of a
priority, neither in terms of engineer time nor paying someone external
(e.g. me) to get it to work.


> For MQTT tbr made a patched apache paho mqtt client which a number of
> sailfish os users have been using quite successfully for some time now:
> https://github.com/dm8tbr/org.eclipse.paho.mqtt.python

That's unfortunately a rather old fork of the python library. As I've
coincidentally added TLS capability to the test server yesterday, I'll
be revisiting it soon. Also as I want to look into MQTT over websockets.

There is also a C/C++ library, libmosquitto. I think I also patched that
with IPHB support at some point, but probably didn't push it to a public
repository.


> This could be rolled into a service without too much trouble really.

Yes, there is a bare bones client service example using it here:
https://github.com/dm8tbr/irssi-mqtt-sailfish

All it does is forward a two line MQTT message as a Sailfish
notification. I wrote it as a demonstration and to scratch my itch of
receiving IRC notifications on my phone. (There is also a irssi script
counterpart)

A more proper deployment of a MQTT based push service would be the
direction for any wider use. I did some initial architecture work and
had started exploratory work on Trusor and Nuntius, respectively the
server and client side daemons. This work has laid dormant for about a
year now, as there was no interest from Jolla to invest into it, nor was
there sufficient community momentum.

Given Jolla's current situation, I very much doubt, that such a service
would be of any priority to justify internal or external investment. So
if, then it would need to come out of the community.

Actually not just the Sailfish/Nemo/Mer community, but essentially
anywhere in the open source community at large, as such a system could
be universally useful. At that time it would be good to check if there
is anything comparable meanwhile that could be used instead.


> However I think the whisper systems guys need to have their own rather
> than relying on android/ios integrated features. Whether this is based
> on MQTT or websockets or some other method of their devising is up to
> them.

Their choice of using platform notification frameworks sounds sensible.
The downside is, that alternative platforms won't have such services, at
least not with user numbers justifying the engineering effort of adding it.


> On Sat, Feb 6, 2016 at 6:35 PM, george b <scooterschorschi at gmail.com
> <mailto:scooterschorschi at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     I did some more search on this issue.
>
>     With libmosquitto and some client implementation (thank you,
>     Yuvraaj), the push service may be possbile with the Mer
>     testplattform.
>
>     The problem with this is, that the guys from whisper systems have
>     to include this push service within there server application. But
>     I didn't think that they would do this with an experimental server.
>
>     So what we really need is to get Jolla or the Mer Project to set
>     up a reliable push service with an good API...
>

See above.


>
>     Bye
>     Georg
>
>     2016-02-02 20:00 GMT+01:00 Yuvraaj <yuvraaj at gmail.com
>     <mailto:yuvraaj at gmail.com>>:
>
>         I had ported libmosquitto to Diablo and Maemo so that I could
>         use it in my app qgvdial.
>         I've even pulled out the class I used into a separate
>         repository so that anyone else can use it:
>         https://github.com/uvatbc/simplify/tree/master/qt/mqclient
>
>         Hope this helps.
>         -UV
>
>
>         On 02/02/2016 06:04 AM, Tone Kastlunger wrote:
>>         AFAIK, someone had putted together a concept-proof push service.
>>
>>         On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 9:14 PM, Erik Lundin
>>         <erik at lists.lun.nu <mailto:erik at lists.lun.nu>> wrote:
>>
>>             Den 2016-02-01 kl. 19:58, skrev george b:
>>
>>                 The only missing thing is a working push service to
>>                 get a real user
>>                 experience with a messaging application.
>>
>>                 Does anyone know something about that? I didn't find
>>                 any good resources
>>                 about this topic on the internet.
>>
>>
>>             There exists a question about that at TJC [1]. One idea,
>>             described at [2], seems to be to use an MQTT based
>>             service. Not much seems to have happened the last years
>>             though.
>>
>>             I'm not involved in any of this myself but thought I
>>             could share what I have seen, since I also think it would
>>             be nice with some push service for SFOS.
>>
>>             /Erik
>>
>>             [1]
>>             https://together.jolla.com/question/9724/push-notifications/
>>             [2]
>>             https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Middleware/PushNotifications
>>

Cheers

Thomas