Making Android chat application from scratch

Question

I need to make chat application for android. I thought of using PHP script to implement the chat application. Basic idea is to send message form android client to PHP script and

Answer 1

You can do the following

• Make a persistent tcp connection between your device and the PHP server

• When a message is broadcast send it over the tcp connection of each device

• On the device process this notification and you are good to go.

If you want to use Java on the server side I have your project already finished and ready to ship ;) (just kidding)

But if you are interested check out the Device-To-Device messaging framework of OpenMobster Mobile Cloud platform. The project is free and open source. Here is a link to the Device-To-Device Framework: http://code.google.com/p/openmobster/wiki/D2DPushFramework

and http://code.google.com/p/openmobster/wiki/PushFramework

The above three steps are already taken care of by the framework. The developer just has to focus on the App itself

Good Luck!!!!

Answer 2

Don't use C2DM, its a deprecated. Please go through the GCM(Global Cloud Messaging),

please follow this link, http://developer.android.com/google/gcm

Answer 3

Have you heard of Firebase? Firebase. Making a chat app with Firebase is like eating pizza.

Answer 4

You'd probably want to use Google's C2DM, though it's not free.

Your php server would get a message from a phone, do it's processing, then make a HTTPS request to Google's C2DM service, which sends the messages to the destination android device.

http://code.google.com/android/c2dm/#push-process

Answer 5

Yes there is several ways to do this

1. you can just post to the server and from the server send push notifications to the mobiles
2. You can make the mobile keep checking for updates if it exists

Answer 6

You will require to finish these steps ( at least ):

1. setup a PHP web server
2. register for Android Push Notification (you probably need that)
3. create database schema
4. write your own codes to allow users to submit & retrieve chat messages
5. security !!!