Hello, World!

Recently I've been working on a personal Java project of mine, and I've been having a lot of fun slowly watching the pieces come together. The real fun, if I'm completely honest, has been mainly due to the fact that a lot of the frameworks that I've used are new to me, meaning there's been a lot to learn, and also there's a lot to improve upon when I no doubt refactor everything later.  Harnessing the power of bullet points, here's what the project has involved so far:

• Android
• C2DM
• Google App Engine and BigTable
• Restlet

As you can see from the above list, it's an Android project, and my first one at that.  Armed with a book, some simple Googling skills, and a little head-scratching, I've so far managed to concoct the following:

• Android device can register itself with Google's C2DM service
• Android device can call the web service (using Restlet) to request certain functionality, and pass the C2DM registration key to it so that the device can receive near real-time notifications once tasks have been completed
• Web service can persist the information using Google's BigTable, and can service other requests
• Web service can send notifications to registered Android apps using C2DM

Of course, I say that all of these pieces are working, but I'll hold my hand up and readily admit that I've only tested things so far in Eclipse using the Android emulator. I don't really intend to test fully using my own device (the rather fantastic Droid X) until I have everything working for sure in the emulator first...don't ask why, it's just how I feel like doing things. :)

So what do I have left to do?  At this point, there's still a lot to be done on the device side of things...mainly UI, and of course I still have to deploy the web service to Google App Engine, but all of this is to come.

So that's pretty much what I'm going to be writing about, and probably starting with C2DM. As all of this is a new playing area for me, I'm pretty sure that what I say will be subject to subsequent corrections; but that's kinda the point...we all learn from our mistakes, and if I can write about something, and if that something actually makes some sense to others, then I may just have achieved a basic understanding of that subject. :)