In most of the mobile and tablet application that we use every day we can see the application notifications and news services which helps the developers and data providers to be more engaged with their users and make it much more pleasing experience while using the application. These notifications can be categorized to few types base on the way they are working.
The first type and most expensive type is push notifications which usually hosted on a cloud service and pushed to user mobile device by special event which triggers on specific time or happening. These notifications mostly pushed from a web or cloud service to the mobile device and it would increase the cost as the number of the users grow.
The second type of notifications are less flexible as the it only triggers when the users open the application and it makes a request to the server or web service to retrieve the unread messages. This method also requires a database and web service to transfer the messages to the application. With using this method the developer also can keep track of the users and the notifications.
The last type is the most easiest and cheapest among other types of notifications. This method is very similar to the second type of the notifications and basically it’s a simple news or message delivery where it trigger by lunching the application and retrieve all the existing messages and display it to the user.
In all these notification types, it is necessary to have database, hosting and more importantly to have web service as line of communication between the server and the application.
In this article, we will attempt to create a free notification system and delivery system with minimum programming knowledge and absolutely free of charge.
The first requirement to have notification system is the content creation system which allow us to create the notification messages. Since we are trying to make it absolutely free of charge, I’m suggesting the WordPress.com blog system which allow you to make free blogs with 3GB of free hosting for the media files. With use of the WordPress blog system we would be able to create messages and keep a history of message on WordPress website. Since we get an administration account, no longer we have to worry about the system failure due to hardware and software issues or the security of the system.
The WordPress website has a feature allow the blog reader to subscribe to each blog RSS feed which is available at http://blog-name.wordpress.com/feed/. The data is formatted to standard XML and it can be used to deliver the data to the application.
The last part of the system is develop a simple XML or RSS reader in your application and read the data from the WordPress feed url. With a bit of effort you can make it more flexible notification system by displaying the messages since the last timestamp.
If you are trying to use this method to create notification system for your application or software, tweet me @masoudhaghi and let me know about it or comment it below.
