Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Auto-refresh and mosquitto


In general, auto-refresh was something I didn't want to include - ever! It would mean that even without user intervention qgvdial burns up the CPU. I've hated that about any phone app.

The "mosquitto" method pushes all the polling to a server away from the phone. The server then notifies the phone when there is anything to update. The phone doesn't do anything more than listen on a socket, thus increasing battery life considerably.

I've got the mosquitto method up and running on my phone for the last year or so and the server and the entire flow works out pretty well.
The battery life hasn't suffered at all and I still get updates within 30 seconds of a phone call or text.

However, I've not gotten around to making my mosquitto server publicly available - mostly because it would involve pulling the users credentials into the server - and to do that I need to take reasonable precautions to secure the server.
This takes time and money, both of which I don't have.

I'm not ready to make qgvdial a paid service as yet so the mosquitto method is right now something the end-user will have to setup on their own.