iPhone Push Notification Testing:

Testing out the interaction after receiving a remote push notifications on the iphone can be very annoying. Apple does not make it easy to setup remote push notifications. Plus development time is much slower if you try to build and test this interaction while waiting for remote notifications. And unfortunately Apple doesn’t provide a way to test out remote notifications on the simulator.

So instead of using a remote notification I used a local notification for testing this interaction.
In your UIApplication delegate instead of using this delegate method:

- (void)application:(UIApplication *)application
     didReceiveRemoteNotification:(NSDictionary *)userInfo

I used this:

- (void)application:(UIApplication *)application
        didReceiveLocalNotification: (UILocalNotification *)notification

You can then schedule a local notification (Apple Docs). This will then simulate receiving a notification when you are in the app.

To simulate the notification when the app isn’t in the foreground I created a local notification inside the delegate method:

-(void)applicationDidEnterBackground:(UIApplication *)application.

I set it up so as soon as you closed the app the notification would fire showing the default alert box.

Here is the code I used to create the local notification inside the DidEnterBackground method.

NSDate *nowDate = [NSDate date];
NSTimeInterval seconds = 0;
NSDate *newDate = [nowDate dateByAddingTimeInterval:seconds];

UILocalNotification *localNotif = [[UILocalNotification alloc] init];
if (localNotif != nil)
{
  localNotif.fireDate = newDate;
  localNotif.timeZone = [NSTimeZone defaultTimeZone];

  localNotif.alertBody = @"You have new notifications";
  localNotif.alertAction = NSLocalizedString(@"View", nil);

  localNotif.soundName = UILocalNotificationDefaultSoundName;
  localNotif.applicationIconBadgeNumber = 2;

  NSDictionary *infoDict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:@"2"
       forKey:@"NewNotifications"];
  localNotif.userInfo = infoDict;

  [[UIApplication sharedApplication] scheduleLocalNotification:localNotif];
  [localNotif release];
}

When you click the “View” button on the alert box, the application will come to the foreground and the didReceiveLocalNotification will be called. You can then do what you need to do based on what data you passed to it via the NSDictionary object in the local notification.

So the main difference in your code between the local and remote notification is that in the local notification you’ll have to access the data you sent to it with [notification userInfo] and in the remote notification, the dictionary object is what is passed to it.

Server-side Javascript using Google’s V8 Engine.

Recently I started working on an open source project with my good friend, Wess Cope, who is more passionate about javascript than anyone I’ve ever met. It was this that drove the want to be able to use javascript for everything. So we built CoreJS which you can find at https://github.com/frenzylabs/CoreJS.

We used http://wiki.commonjs.org/wiki/CommonJS#Low-level_APIs for a reference on what should be implemented in CoreJS.


Aren’t there already server-side javascript frameworks?

The main one out there is nodejs. Overall it’s pretty good but the main issue we had with it is that it forces everything to be asynchronous. Having it be asynchronous is great but we wanted to have the flexibility to be both. There are definitely times when you don’t want something to be asynchronous.

So what we ended up doing is setting up our functions to be asynchronous when there was a callback and synchronous otherwise.

//Synchronous
var data = Http.post("/path/to/file", {arg:"arg1", arg2:"arg2"});
//Asynchronously
Http.post("/path/to/file", {arg:"arg1", arg2:"arg2"}, function(data){
                     print(data);
           });

It’s definitely new and not complete yet but check it out and give us some feedback. We tried to add some decent documentation on how it all works cause we know it was very annoying to even try and build this with the lack of documentation. https://github.com/frenzylabs/CoreJS/wiki