To my opinion now with HTML 5 this feature is something that should be in Mendix out of the box or solved with a widget. It would be so nice to not only have the activity type ‘show notification’ but also the type ‘push notification’ to a user object.
Appronto has offcourse it’s chat widget where notification can be pushed. Couple of drawbacks: it’s not free, they use a polling mechanism instead of websockets and you have to make user sessions persistent which influence according to the documentation the performance of the application (Would be nice it gave some more explanation about the impact, because I now have no clue what so ever about the impact when I flick this option from false to true).
There are some nice third parties with push notification frameworks:
These look easily to implement in a Mendix application (most have rest webservices to work with). Problem is off course privacy. The messages go to an external party and I do not think most companies would like that.
Then we have some frameworks that can be incorporated inside Mendix:
https://github.com/Atmosphere/atmosphere/wiki
https://github.com/phonegap-build/PushPlugin
The first and the last are looking promising. Because I would like to be able to push to the app on a phone and not only to the web browser the user is using. Anybody already tackled this problem or has some more frameworks he would like to share? It would be nice (until Mendix provides this out of the box or with a widget :) ) if the post could be a nice entry into the world of push notifications.
Regards,
Ronald
[EDIT]
Google just released also something interesting: http://blog.chromium.org/2015/03/chrome-42-beta-push-notifications_12.html More info about Google Cloud Messaging https://developer.android.com/google/gcm/gcm.html Very interesting to push updates and keep the messages themselves on the Mendix server.