I have an app that uses Parse.com as the backend. I have the login successfully working. But now I want users to be able to create and join groups within the app. Then I also want them to be able to chat with the group but my main concern is just having them be able to create and join. What is the best way to go about this? Is there a tutorial for it I could go off of?
Don't. Parse is a horrible platform to build off, as you may know Apple just released CloudKit at WWDC. Use this. I was going to initially use Parse and it was hard to get anything done, and it took me a few weeks to get one of my tasks done. At WWDC my team and I got almost the entire app done in one day with CloudKit
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From what i've been able to discern so far, Firebase/Firestore seem like the perfect platform to use for an app I am writing. However I can't quite connect all the dots when trying to design my backend. I am hoping that someone will be able to give answer a couple of basic questions about the use of FB/FS.
With my app, a user will be able to share a small piece of data with a select group of friends. ie if the data is to be a To-Do list, the user would create the list on his device (iphone only) and then invite a small group of friends (probably less than 10) to share that data. The friends would have read-only access by default, however, the user can assign any number of them to be "admins" which would allow them read/write permission. When any changes occur to the data, all "friends" who have access to the data will be notified (by some means - push notifications etc). They can manually sync or setup the app to automatically sync. It seems like FB/FS can be used for this right out of the box. However there are a couple of concepts that I can't get my head around.
The database I setup is accessible by ALL users of my app by default. It's not clear (at least to me) how I would set it up so when a user creates (in this case) a to-do list and invites 5 friends, only those 5 friends can access or even know about that data. This is main stumbling block in my development path.
Regarding invitations. I read in the FB/FS documentation that invitations and notifications are among the many features available. I'm not clear on how this will work if a) the recipient doesn't have my app installed and b) how the inviter would get feedback when the invitation was accepted or declined.
Any guidance that anyone is willing to share to help me get started will be a huge help and will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
You can create new privates collections inside the main collection, and set different rules for access.
Check at: Firebase Firestore get private fields
I'd like to build a simple iOS only app that's going to be social. I don't yet have a way to monetize this app, so I'd like to keep this project as cheap as possible. Since it's iOS only, I figured I would use CloudKit because of its very generous free tier. However, if I ever decided to make this a cross platform app, would I be able to migrate my user data somewhere else?
I think you can use CloudKit with Android because of the CloudKit JS implementation. The real problem is, that I think that also the android user needs an iCloud Account do something with that.
So maybe the better way is to use google firebase.
https://firebase.google.com
As of December 2019, there is no simple way to migrate data from CloudKit. The data stored in each user's private data base is not accessible by the developer.
There is always the option to do this inside of the app for each individual user. If the data is not too large and complicated it should be easily done.
But make sure to inform the user and give them a choice to move or don't move the data. Let both services run for some time parallel before removing the cloudkit option for old users completely. Obviously moving data using the app can cause certain issues if the move doesn't go as planned.
I'm a new junior developer joining to this awesome community. I'm developing my first big personal project, and I'm stuck with this specific part.
I would like to build a feed notification system like Facebook with the following features:
Track different models and relationships, for example: new badges earned, new comments in subscribed models, new posts by followed users, new comments on my posts, new likes on my posts...
Group the activities, for example, instead of have 400 activities for each likes in my post, has just one notification that says "User X and 399 more likes your post"
Be possible to mark notifications as readed to don't see them again, at least you explore past notifications.
Scalability, good perfomance, and possible integration in the future in an APP developed for example with Iconic framework.
Push notifications are optional, it's ok if the user need to refresh the page to see the new notifications.
So for that, I have readed a lot of. I have watched some Railcast Videos, followed tutorials, but still I'm not really sure how to begin.
I have considered the following methods:
Use public_activity gem, adding a new a new field "readed" to the migration. And thinking how to manage grouped activites. But I have seen a lot of complains about perfomance. I'm expecting to have around 50000 users in my website in the first month (I already have the users), with peaks of 500-1000 users online. So maybe this is not the best way to go... as I would have a lot of activities, a lot of "notifications" and a lot of users.
Use a system like https://getstream.io/ because they also have integrations available for RoR and Ruby. The main concern here is about pricing, because checking it, if I'm not wrong, with that number of users, with around 10 notifications per user per day, I would be paying probably more than 200$ month, and always keep growing as the users grow.
Build my own system, maybe using Redis. But maybe this would be too complex and require a lot of time for a good, efficient and working code.
So still, considered these option, I don't know which one is best for me, or if it's another possibilities.
If someone have asked before these questions, please let me know your thoughts and what you think is the correct way to go.
Thank you !! :)
I'm developing an app for my summer iPhone class that is designed for couples, and am not sure the best way to have two different users phones reading and writing to the same database for a single account. The two users create and grant points to each other for "rewards", "penalties" and "prizes". I'm attempting to put the local databases into CoreData and then push it into iCloud. However, I'm only finding ways that that works for a single persons app. This is a two player game that needs to update a shared database. I would greatly appreciate if you would have any suggestions on ways to either send notifications directly to each and maintain congruent separate local databases, or to have a single back end database for two users in a single account that both users' phone can push and pull from to read and write. I'm having trouble finding the right path to pursue for this.
Thanks.
You can easily save Database on server side with the help of many mechanism like PHP Script is the best example for this.
link - Advices on server implementation for server/client structure iOS App development?
There is a third-party framework for iOS called Parse. It's a terrific backend service that adds a cloud database. You can create objects and store it in the cloud and access it anytime, and it comes with push notifications and analytics functionality. It's tuned for many platforms, including iOS and it's straightforward to access all of its functionalities.
The site is here: https://parse.com
Whenever you try to use one database for multiple device, you need to create / save database in server side or you can try Parse. because local database is always used for device specific.
I currently work at a school and have an idea to create an app that allows students to contact a grown up (for example, the principle) anonymously through an app. The app would quite simply consist of a contact form. I am trying to find out the best, and easiest way to achieve this without setting up servers with a separate API. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to achieve it? Is there any way to set up an e-mail form with a pre set recipient and a built in sender-account? Please guide me in the right direction.
You would need to implement an SMTP client. You can use open source code like skpsmtpmessage
It's likely that their example app could be your solution.
Your biggest problem will be the deployment. You definitely need to pay an $99/y developer account and add all the students device ID's to your account (with a maximum of 100 devices/y) or register all of them as beta tester (I don't know the limitations).
Probably this isn't doable so easily, as it seems you don't have iOS developing experience so far. Maybe you can find something on the app store that works with self hosted databases. But you definitely need to host some kind of webApp/API.
You may want to give Appygram a try to handle the back-end if you are able to set up the contact form itself. While it's a separate hosted API, at least you don't have to build/manage it.
Appygram is a free web service that would allow you to configure all the details such as which adults could be contacted, their point(s) of contact (i.e. email address), and it would process and send all the submissions for you. All your app needs to do is send a form post request.
A nice thing about having this information outside of the iOS app itself is that you can change the contact details on the fly without requiring an update to the iOS app itself. Whether you use Appygram (which, since I contribute to it, I am slightly biased toward!) or something similar, I would say that since this is for students, I would recommend a solution that would allow you to update your configuration without requiring app updates.
Finally, I'd second what Julian said. The challenge here could be with deployment. One possible alternative would be to make this a mobile-friendly web page accessible only via student login or on the school network (or both). Would probably be easier development-wise and wouldn't require installs nor the hurdles that Julian described with device registration, etc. And, Appygram would still work with this setup as well.
Good luck!