• Coding

  • [Android] Breaking news application

Dears,

a client demands a breaking news app like LBCI, elnashra.... i'm not very familiar with android, i can make simple apps but not too professional. i'm a programmer, so in theory, i can make the app whenever the platform is, with some time and research.

i saw many sites on internet that convert a wordpress site to a native android app, so do you think that this is the simplest solution, can i make a fully working app using conversion from wordpress, don't forget the alerts for breaking news, and all features that exist in Lebanese news apps.

please if anybody has experience with such apps, please advice me.

Thank you.
Maybe more info about demand? He wants a specific site or an app to fetch news from many sites?
What does wordpress have to do with this? Wordpress is bad enough in its normal usage/state, don't shove it into android.

If you know web development, you can just use cordova for android, it will allow you to write the program in html/javascript and you don't have to know much about android or java. You have to build an api on the server side, and have the app get the info from it. For the push notification use google cloud messaging (gcm) It will allow you to send push notifications to the devices.

If you don't know what an api is this project is way over your head.

Also, I have the same questions as the user above me.
thanks for your replies.

he wants to post his own news, categorized by breaking news, political, ... and some features like update interval, customize which news to receive only.

so, my new question is what is the shortest way to start, since he didn't want a big app, just an app to display news.
A very simple example would be:

A list view populated with an adapter through a database so you can display all the news headlines and when you click on an item in the list view it will open another activity which contains the information about that headline.

You want also to create an interface to the person requesting the app since he is not a programmer he cant edit the database, you can make him an interface with EditText for his headline and the News he wants to submit , then this is stored in the database and when the update interval is reached , the app will fetch the database and update the listView again if there is a new update.

This is just off the top of my head , there are certainly many specific details. did you at least try to connect a database to the application ? that would be your start.
aliessayli2 wroteA very simple example would be:

A list view populated with an adapter through a database so you can display all the news headlines and when you click on an item in the list view it will open another activity which contains the information about that headline.

You want also to create an interface to the person requesting the app since he is not a programmer he cant edit the database, you can make him an interface with EditText for his headline and the News he wants to submit , then this is stored in the database and when the update interval is reached , the app will fetch the database and update the listView again if there is a new update.

This is just off the top of my head , there are certainly many specific details. did you at least try to connect a database to the application ? that would be your start.
Thanks for the hints, but i'm thinking of a RSS Reader that read the feed from WordPress Site. sticking with WP is because it solves the server side issue, you post on WP, and voila, the feed is unified and ready. it is feasible ??
amkahal wrote
Thanks for the hints, but i'm thinking of a RSS Reader that read the feed from WordPress Site. sticking with WP is because it solves the server side issue, you post on WP, and voila, the feed is unified and ready. it is feasible ??
Well I have no knowledge on that I never tried it but I am sure there are solutions for you if you search enough. As simple as your solution sounds , I think it will be harder than what I presented you in the last post.

this is what my idea would look like.



From this tutorial http://www.androidpit.com/java-guide-2-program-your-own-rss-reader


There is another way which is webview , so you just display the website inside the app



but I am not sure if you want this , I personally as a user don't like when I download an app to find that it is only a copy of the website
So you're not good server side and you are not good with android. You're not giving us a lot to work with here.

See if you can get a wordpress plugin that will give you an api for the website. An api is a set of pages that will display the news data in a way that is easy for a program to parse. If you can get a wordpress api, it will be very easy to make an android program parse the data and display it however you like.

For the push notifications, you need to see if wordpress has a push notification plugin for gcm(google cloud messaging)

I really hate wordpress.
10 days later
Hello amkahal,

I used to work on one of the websites of the companies you mentioned in your question.
I have developed the server-side code of the breaking news push notification service on android(Google GCM) and iOS(APNS).
... again server-side only ...

long story short I have used PHP CLI along with shell scripts and cron jobs to create an asynchronous server that initiates concurrent connections to GCM and APNS services to deliver more than 1 million notifications daily.

Queues were creates on a MySQL database.

A listener process that checks the queues for new records, then it would initiate two kinds of processes:

- A process to chunk the tokens into smaller batches ready to be sent.
- A single or multiple sender processes to connect to the appropriate gateway and send the notifications.

In addition to the listener a watchdog process flushes stuck or interrupted sending records and clears the logs and database regularly.

The main points you need to consider:
- Your application might(hopefully) hit a large number of users in a very short time (30 000 users the first week on iOS only in our case)
- Tokens, tokens and tokens ... registration, update, expiry ...
- Token Expiry : GCM returns for each sent token even if it's a multicast message the delivery info, as for APNS you need to query a feedback service regularly to get the expired tokens and delete them from your database (this point is well documented in the official docs of both services).
- Register your app for a GCM API key and an APNS certificate.
- GCM uses HTTP POST requests, APNS uses sockets over SSL.
- APNS has a sandbox service for your development and testing phase separate from the production environment.
- Both services' messages payloads can contain key-value pairs for data delivery.
- Both services' have payload size constraints (GCM is larger).

I guess this covers the main points you need to know if you where to consider developing this feature.

There are many companies as third parties that handle all this headache, they usually charge by message don't have much info on that maybe someone who had tried to use them might share their experience.

I can't provide any info on the mobile's side since I have never worked on mobile development.
Maybe you're interested in finishing all the other more essential parts like fetching the news from the server before going into notifications, if this is the case ignore my post till you fell that it is a good read.
Anyway ... good luck ...

Cheers
5 months later
Dear,

Wordpress is not bad as "user" said, but it can help if you can get the right plugins to get the RestfulAPI work for you, otherwise I can advice you about Parse, Parse is a Powerful Back-End and Framework that will make it easy for you to have a Backend for any type of device or program in almost any language and it's all on the cloud, this also support the possibility to use Parse Push Notification Service so Breaking News would be working perfectly with such a service.

Parse Documentation
Parse Website

If you need any help message me.

Regards,
Mohamad Kaakati