Azure Web Site with Push notifications

3
votes

I'm trying to develop a Windows Phone 8 app. I've created a Web Site in a Windows Azure account which is a MVC 4 project with REST endpoints. I've got a SQL database in Azure to store data from the Azure Web Site. Ocassionaly, I want my application to send PUSH notifications to mobile phones. So I've created a Mobile Service and I've linked the SQL database with the Mobile Service's database in order to have got the same data for the web page and the service.

I though that when I send a HTTP POST to the web site, the script in the database from the Azure Mobile Service would be launched but it looks not to be true. Isn't it? Because of that, I would write in the controller of a HTTP POST endpoint the code to send the data to the Mobile Service endpoint in order to launch the Javascript code to send the Push Notification.

Is that the right approach for my goal? Is there any way for sending PUSH notifications from an Azure Web Site or it is only allowed from a Mobile Service?

My last question: Do you know any books or blogs about development in Windows Azure? On the internet there is lots of documentation but principally those are get started tutorials. I've read some books but those are really complex, boring and not really practical.

Really thanks in advance and Happy Christmas for those who are celebrating it.

2
mobileazure

2 Answers

2
votes

As your website MVC4 based and is running on Windows Azure using SQL Database as backend, I will guess that it is based on ASP.NET and i will write my suggestion based on that.

Now about your question "Is there any way for sending PUSH notifications from a Azure Web Site or it is only allowed from a Mobile Service?" I would say, Azure Mobile web services are designed for the same purpose for any service running on Windows Azure to send push notification on multiple of platforms. Application developer can choose to use Mobile Services to expedite their development as well as have multiple application using the one single service for such objective.

However as you mentioned "Is there any way for sending PUSH notifications from a Azure Web Site" this is not depend on "Azure web sites" instead it is depend on what development technology you are using with your Windows Azure Application. For example in ASP.NET your can use SignalR implementation if your application is based on Java, PHP, Python, Node,js etc then you can find some other run time specific real time implementation. If you look around for websockets you will find implementation in almost every popular language or look for comet programming on this regard. Not only that you can use some of the popular 3rd party applications for this purpose as well. i.e. pusher or any other.

While Windows Azure Mobile Services will give you the best results on Windows Azure platform as it is designed to provide such specific functionality for applications running on it.