Today we dealt with some push messages overloading our servers, some of the apps developed in Codename One
are remarkably successful and as a result our push servers got bogged down.
To mitigate that and prevent service interruptions we moved all push activity to the new servers, this effectively
means that a push operation on the old servers will map to the new servers seamlessly. This also means
that we no longer support the null push target even for the old push servers. Its just too expensive to support
on scale of 150M+ devices.
Unless you use null pushes this should have no effect on your code. It does mean though that we see the new
push infrastructure as solid enough for production usage. We now recommend that you migrate
to the new push infrastructure as that will increase the performance of your push by eliminating a stage
in the push process and will remove a potential failure point. You should do that anyway in the long term so you
might as well do it right now…
The Next Step
We intend to change the behavior of the registerPush call to return the new push key format
(cn1-*) which will simplify our server code considerably and should work seamlessly with code that doesn’t
make assumptions about key length.
E.g. up until now the servers would return a numeric device ID, so if you relied on this key being numeric or
having a length below 20 decimals this won’t be the case anymore.
This is generally a good thing for moving forward as it will simplify the migration process to the new push servers
even further.
Deprecation Of The Old Push Servers
The obvious question is when we will take down the old push server API support. This will not happen before
the 3.3 time line and probably not before the 3.4 timeline. When 3.3 rolls out (it is scheduled for January) we
would deploy server code that will let us know who is still using the old API and we will work with individual users
of the old push API to migrate their code.
If you have device code that calls the Push API’s then we urge you to start migrating right away since
you would need to update all the client side calls. If this isn’t the case and you only initiate push from the server
then the migration process should be really simple. I can attest to that personally as it took us under an hour to
migrate our old push servers to use the new push service internally.
