I have a mobile app where people store their contacts. I want to be able to sync these contacts with the phone so if anyone calls my users they would have the name in the address book and show it when getting the call.
I was thinking about implementing carddav or similar protocol, so my users could add this account to their phone and sync with it (it would be read only). I thought it was easy with just returning an xml for a certain endpoint with basic auth, but I'm not finding examples.
Other idea was that I run a carddav server and both my backend and the user could connect to it. My backend would fill it for the user and my user could sync with it from his phone.
I would prefer the first, implementing my own endpoint. Would it be enough if I just reverse engineer the carddav endpoints and build up the xml results on my own? Any guides or very easy implementations? Of course I won't need the full specification implemented for this. My preferred environment is nodejs but if it's an easy implementation of course I could bring it over from other languages.
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I am planning to create a mobile application for android and ios users, i think i will take a try with xamarin since i will be alone on this project and i don't have a lots of time.
I want that the mobile app for both platform get datas from the api, then if there is new datas available we notify the user by a notification.
How the mobile will work in that kind of project? I mean should i make a background service then check every x seconds/minutes by http request? In that case which time interval? Should i use websockets instead for this case?
The app might be used by many people, so i would to know the scenario in this kind of project: Getting very fast changes, without overload the server due to too many connects or whatever else.
I'm confused about this and i need some lights around, any mobile application/server experiences related would be apprecied!
EDIT:
As suggered by an user, here additional infos:
The api is homemade, restful using JWT made in NodeJS.
Each users on their device should get messages from server asap, even when the app is in background/closed.
Maybe in the future a way to send messages between users themselves.
You have to implement push notification.
It is quite easy to implement this in xamarin. just send the push notification to the device and on the notification received call back send the API request to retrieve the updated data.
Here is the document for sending push notification from custom API.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/push/pushapi
I'm not a mobile developer, so take this with a grain of salt.
The answer to this really depends on what you're doing, which informs how often to check the API. If it's a messaging app, for example, you could have it check every couple minutes to see if there are undelivered messages, then check more frequently for the next X minutes (to facilitate a conversation in real time).
If it's a GPS navigation app to be used while driving, you'd need much more frequent requests.
As for the API, that also depends on what type of API and the number of requests you can make to it. Is it a commercial API that you get x number of calls per hour on? Is it an API that you built? Etc.
Basically, you need to give more information in order to get more specific answers.
I am fairly new at this. I am using Nodejs and Express linked to a mySQL database to build an application and now I need some library that allows that realtime messages are sent to the right users.
I have already tried socket.io but it was a little complicated for me to understand the documentation, so I searched for some other alternatives.
I found Mediator.js and I was trying to implement it in my server but now I am getting to the conclusion that I don't know how to make it work in real time.
The website has an Admin and several normal users;
The users can belong to groups (one, many or none) that the admin assigns.
The Admin has to be able to send a string to the users that belong to a specific group if they are online - realtime.
Is this possible to implement with mediator-js? Admin sends string to server and then server broadcasts to the members of the group that are online in realtime?
Or do I really have to use socket.io?
Thanks for your help in advance.
In our website, we need to achieve a seemingly simple task: Enable the user to send a specific text to all or some of his/her Gmail contacts (including contact selection).
We don't actually need the contact data itself. We prefer some kind of "Gmail Plugin" (if there is one) that asks the user to login and does all the work. Alas, we couldn't find any.
We did find several different Google APIs related to this task. Some of them seem to give us contacts data. Others seem to handle sending email:
There is "Contacts API" under
https://developers.google.com/google-apps/contacts/v3/...
There is "Contacts Service" under
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/contacts/...
There is "Gmail Service" under
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/gmail/...
There is "Gmail Platform Integration" under
https://developers.google.com/gmail/...
Each of the above looks different and there seems to be much overlapping between them.
So what is the recommended method to achieve our original task? Is there a plugin that does it all? If not - should we use separate APIs for getting the contacts data and sending the emails, or are there Google APIs that combine both sub-tasks? In case those are separate tasks - is it possible to email via Gmail, or are there other recommended services for the email sending part?
To directly answer your question: you must use the first API you pointed, Contacts API under https://developers.google.com/google-apps/contacts/v3/.
Basically, you want to use the Google Contacts API with OAuth2 authentication in your website: user will be prompted by Google to allow your website to read user contacts.
First, read a bit about OAuth2 authentication flows here: http://alexbilbie.com/2013/02/a-guide-to-oauth-2-grants/
Second step: register your app on Google Console and get your key/pass for the Contacts API (you'll need contacts.readonly permission): https://console.developers.google.com
Then, as you'll use the OAuth2 for Web Servers, check this Google documentation: https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OAuth2WebServer
Alternatively, you can use third part libraries to easily import contacts to your website. There are free libraries, like PHP OpenInviter.org, Ruby OmniAuth gem, and paid alternatives, like CloudSponge.com (multi-language).
Disclaimer: I work for CloudSponge.com.
You could achieve this as you say with Google APIs and a Chrome Extension for example.
The user can add a Chrome Extension from the Chrome Webstore. The Extension will provide the user with a user interface to allow them to compose their message and send to the selected contacts.
The users contacts can be retrieved with the Google Contacts API.
The message can be sent to the selected contacts with the Gmail API.
There is a lot of documentation and examples for all of the above which together will give you what you want.
Depending on how much use this is going to get, you could use a contextual gadget which is browser agnostic - but visible in all emails in Gmail.
This is wrong the idea is to post the text to buffer a and submit pointer to array on buffet a and copy it to class b pointer a 0 than release the array and buffer so new allocation can be done
Im trying to add a feature to my website that involves the typical "invite your friends" with help from a contact importer (cloudsponge). Its a pretty popular and gets the job done but I need something faster..
The problem with cloudsponge is that they request all contacts in one call, this could mean a long wait time for someone with alot of contacts.
I looked at their rest calls and there doesnt seem to be a way to load contacts in pieces. Do any of these contact importing services allow you to pull in a few contacts at a time (lets say 50) so that we can show our user the first 50 contacts and load the rest / updating the view. So they dont have to wait forever for all the contacts to be pulled?
Ive looked at other apis like context io but cant seem to find a solution to this one.
I built the CloudSponge API.
Early on, we decided to support imports across a variety of providers while exposing a simple and consistent interface. Pagination and rolling or real-time access to contacts were things that were excluded in order to do that. To provide end-user feedback on the progress of the import, we added the /events endpoint.
So far import speed hasn't been a major issue for a couple reasons:
In general, end users with an address book of 10000+ contacts are rare (although this may not be the case for certain niches).
End users who do have this many contacts in their address book usually understand that it will take a while to import.
Having said that, the speed is something that we can definitely improve upon. Here's a few ideas:
We can allow for returning only a subset of all contacts by default. For example, we currently return all contacts for Gmail, which is usually a much larger number of contacts than are actually stored in 'my contacts'.
We can implement parallel paginated imports on the server side. This will make our server process work harder and faster to download the user's contacts from, say, Gmail. This adds complexity on our side but keeps the API untouched.
We can implement your suggestion: add a rolling or real-time access to contacts in our API, either in an extended endpoint or a new version of our interface.
I'm happy to work with you on exploring these to improve our service. Send us an email: support#cloudsponge.com
Graeme
Can't find an endpoint providing "Like a page" (not a page update) via the API. Any suggestions? Looking here https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/pages/pages
You won't find such an endpoint: "like a page" is explicitly intended to be done by users, never via an API. None of the major platforms that allow things like Likes provide API endpoints for that action (Facebook doesn't, Foursquare doesn't either) because they do not want developers gaming the system and inadvertently (or on purpose) performing those actions without user consent.
So no: you're probably never going to find an API endpoint for that.
Documentation for this endpoint is coming soon (we're in the process of auditing our API to document the new APIs introduced by #allnew4sq)
The endpoint is /pages/USER_ID/like and without any additional params probably does what you want it to do.