We have a website that alerts our subscribers when certain event occur and we want to develop a push notification app. are there tools/plugins for buzztouch that would be right for us. Basically the user would install our app then they're fill in two field that would contain their username & password (that they'd normally used to login to our website) - the app would then send information upstream to our site along with some sort of token/id that would get them registered in our database for push notifications when event occurs and I assume we'd use that token/id passed upstream from the app in order alert them in the future via a push notication. sounds fairly simple - is this something that buzztouch can do?

The question would be, is this something that *you* can do? "can it be done with buzztouch". Yes, absolutely. can it be done with buzztouch 'out of the box' ? Maybe, it depends on your complexity. Buzztouch isn't an SDK or a Framework (in my mind) so much as it is a 'methodology' or 'workflow' that allows for some nifty and creative 'configuration based' apps. Users and developers create 'plugins' to enhance their apps. Some of these plugins are for sale, and some of them will do what you want. Some things may need some modification. If you have no programming experience, you can still create your dream app, it just might take a little longer. If you have programming experience, then some things will flow quicker than others. The Buzztouch 'plugin market' is also not the 'only' source for BT Related tools… Mr. VanBeveren keeps a 'third party' marketplace at his website (buzztouchmods.com) and PSMDanny (http://bt-addons.com) creates really nifty scripts for Joomla and Wordpress sites to interact with apps, as well as some uber-slick iOS plugins. 'Push' is a technology that is available in your BT App… although some folks have a far easier time setting up 'push' to operate through a third party (Parse.com comes to mind) easier than through their own setups… your situation may vary slightly. All in all 'yes'. But is it the best tool for the job. "I" say yes. not everyone will. Cheers! -- Smug

Do all the subscribers get notified on the same event? Is the notification initiated by a human or by some automation software? Can Buzztouch do the job easily? If the answers are (1) Yes and (2) Human If the answers are different, then you can still use Buzztouch with modifications. Give us more information by answering those questions. -- Niraj

Also, push notifications are not emails. When you send an email, it will go through, unless it is marked as spam by some agency or provider. People are accustomed to having a look at email inbox at least once a day. This may or -- most likely - may not be the case with push notifications. On an Android phone, I shall spot a push notification relatively easily. On my 10.1 inch Android tablet, the notification is so small compared to the screen size that I will most likely miss it entirely. Your users will also have to accept the receiving of the notifications, and there may be some people who will not do that, for various reasons. You will probably have to educate your users to watch for error signals that come through push notifications. Technically speaking, you can do push through Buzztouch. It comes almost ready to go, but not quite, so there will be additional steps both on the self hosted server and within the app itself. These steps will entail contacting your hosting solution to open the necessary ports and so on. It is possible with Buzztouch, but not out of the box.

Thanks so much for the replies: each subscriber get notified of a different event that relates directly to his or her account in our system The first response as to whether "I" can do it...the answer is yes I can - no doubt. It actually got me thinking. I was in the 1st graduating class of Comp Sci major at the University I attended when I graduated in 1976. My first job was writing Autocoder for an IBM 360/30 - then we switched to Cobol. In college we wrote in Fortran, Apl, Basic and Pascal. I then went to work for a Bank where I wrote Assembler on an IBM 370/135 then moved to a private company where we had all DEC equipment. The I started my own business in 84 and we developed in Turbo Pascal and when windows came along we developed our app in Visual C++. After that mostly LAMP using PHP and Java. Our Main app here is all in Java with an Oracle Back end. so the simple answer is yes I can write whatever needs to be written. LOL

Great. Except that my first machine was IBM 360/44, FORTRAN IV under PS and DOS (this is not PC or MS DOS; that appeared much later, in 1981.) You'll need PHP in the self hosted server to talk to Buzztouch "operating system" in order to send the notifications automatically. That would essentially be an autoresponder for notifications, well, in a way, certainly. You will also need to explain to your hosting service that you want certain ports to be accessible and open for your PHP server side script. The rest is well explained elsewhere, either in Buzztouch PDF documents or elsewhere on the Internet. Buzztouch is unique in that it is open source to the max. You will find yourself here at home, I'm sure.

Thanks so much for the replies: each subscriber get notified of a different event that relates directly to his or her account in our system The first response as to whether "I" can do it...the answer is yes I can - no doubt. It actually got me thinking. I was in the 1st graduating class of Comp Sci major at the University I attended when I graduated in 1976. My first job was writing Autocoder for an IBM 360/30 - then we switched to Cobol. In college we wrote in Fortran, Apl, Basic and Pascal. I then went to work for a Bank where I wrote Assembler on an IBM 370/135 then moved to a private company where we had all DEC equipment. The I started my own business in 84 and we developed in Turbo Pascal and when windows came along we developed our app in Visual C++. After that mostly LAMP using PHP and Java. Our Main app here is all in Java with an Oracle Back end. so the simple answer is yes I can write whatever needs to be written. LOL

We have two full cabinets in a data center where we host our servers - with our own firewall: all ports are open on all ips - we control access through our Juniper firewall so we're good with the access parts

The solution can't be iOS Push Notifications because of the requirement of "each subscriber get notified of a different event that relates directly to his or her account in our system". Unless ... You can discretely address and communicate with a single device. 1. For iOS Push Notifications, you extend the BuzzTouch Core to associate the Device unique identifier with the User's account. And if Apple allows you access to that device identifier. Look into Parse.com, it has been used with BuzzTouch apps by many folks. Parse has Channels for Push Notifications. Perhaps the Parde capabilities is more suitable, for a fee. 2. Use iOS 7 background activities to check into the Mothership for events. Then use Local Notifications to inform the User. Let us know how you get along. This is fun! :-) Also, get yourself am avatar and sign-up as a Member. -- Niraj

the push notifications are generated by our system, not a human and we generate about 70,000 per day to about 2 million users so I'm thinking we would probably use a 3rd party if the cost not high - otherwise we have lots of server and could easily setup our own server for sending notifications - however I did read that YOU MUST use an apple computer if you want to send push notifications to apple devices.

I don't think you need an Apple Computer to send and generate Push Notifications. Buzztouch uses Linux servers to do it. The confusion might have stemmed from this: All Push Notifications generated by servers are requests sent to Apple. It is the clearinghouse and relay and dispatcher. Apple is the one who sends the actual Push Notification message to the devices (apps). OMG -- You are sending tons of push notifications! Will the Users be overwhelmed and simply ignore or delete the app? -- Niraj

Dusko - you wrote: "Also, push notifications are not emails. When you send an email, it will go through, unless it is marked as spam by some agency or provider. People are accustomed to having a look at email inbox at least once a day. This may or -- most likely - may not be the case with push notifications. On an Android phone, I shall spot a push notification relatively easily. On my 10.1 inch Android tablet, the notification is so small compared to the screen size that I will most likely miss it entirely. Your users will also have to accept the receiving of the notifications, and there may be some people who will not do that, for various reasons. You will probably have to educate your users to watch for error signals that come through push notifications. Technically speaking, you can do push through Buzztouch. It comes almost ready to go, but not quite, so there will be additional steps both on the self hosted server and within the app itself. These steps will entail contacting your hosting solution to open the necessary ports and so on. It is possible with Buzztouch, but not out of the box." I have some questions. ---------------------------- One thing we are concerned about is that we want to be able to have this app deployed on both Iphone and Android devices. Q: Does Buzztouch allow for this? I understand that we have to have accounts on both Google and Apple to get our apps approved. I have accounts at both places for a vbulletin app that we got approved for two of our websites a few years back. It's my understand that we will have to use different platforms for sending push notifications for the iphone and android - we may be looking up upwards of 70,000 notifications per day... Q: are these services to push the notifs free? Our users already get emails to their phone and have been asking for an app since our emails often get diluted in other emails they receive so our users want this app. you wrote: "Technically speaking, you can do push through Buzztouch. It comes almost ready to go, but not quite, so there will be additional steps both on the self hosted server and within the app itself." I understand we will have to develop code on our server that generates the email notifications now to check the database to see if this user has the app installed and then generate the notification and then decide if it gets routed to the Apple transport service or the android transport service - but beyond that are there a specific plugin that we should purchase? thanks so much for all the information thus far. Jeff

Niraj Shah - that's great information about sending the notifications. is there a charge for this - I'm particularly concerned since we may be sending a lot of notifications each day.

Niraj Shah - they will not be overwhelemed - was have 2.8 million users of a free website monitoring service that we offer - so 70,000 / day is nothing compared to our subscriber base.

Niraj Shah - they will not be overwhelemed - was have 2.8 million users of a free website monitoring service that we offer - so 70,000 / day is nothing compared to our subscriber base.

Niraj Shah - they will not be overwhelemed - was have 2.8 million users of a free website monitoring service that we offer - so 70,000 / day is nothing compared to our subscriber base.

note to self: do not press F5 Regresh key on this page to see if anyone has responded. LOL