Hey All,
I'm trying to make a push notification service, mainly as a learning experience (so please do not start suggesting open/closed source alternatives). Being a hardcore Win32 c++ developer, i don't have a lot of web dev. knowledge.
What I'm trying todo:
- Expose an API (over http(s)) to send push notifications to a certain device (device = phone, pc, any device capapble of running my client side push notification software)
- - Create an application (I call this the client) that maintains a single connection with the push server so it can receive notification from the server without polling
My area of "expertise" is the Win32 API and i my language of choice for the client app (and perhaps parts of the server app) is C/C++. So i'm going to try to deploy this on a Windows server.
i have plenty of experience writing scalable server applications for Windows (e.g. async I/O using completion ports). The problem I have is how would I make the http API (written in PHP for example) communicate with my standalone server app that maintains the push connections to my client applications that are running on all kinds of devices? e.g. A request is made through the API to notify device XYZ of an important event. I could store this event and its target deviceID in a simple database using PHP. How can i "kick" my server app (which is just a standalone .exe running on my windows server) so it knows it should deliver this push notification?
The above scenario is what i came up with with my very limited experience in web development. Feel free to suggest some other way to set this up (keeping scalability in mind)