An Eclipse framework to ease notification among MyUniBG apps

The widespread diffusion of Android OS has led to a rapid explosion of the Google Play store (previously Android Market). As of 2011, the Play store includes more applications than the Apple App Store. It is natural to compare this growth to what happened years ago in the area of the World Wide Web, although in the second case, the need was to allow users to interact and collaborate in a more easy way (e.g., social network), while now the need is to try to use the same device everywhere (e.g., office, home) and for everything (e.g., work, free time). This reflects the rising concept of “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD). In this vision, University of Bergamo decided to develop its own Android application (named MyUniBG) in order to provide to their students and staff members advanced features (e.g., information about lessons hours and course details). In this paper, we want to highlight how, thanks to the support provided by Eclipse framework, we can make a step toward the “BYOD vision”. The aim of the tool is to ease the notification (e.g., variations in lessons hours) using Google Cloud Messaging for Android, a service that allows you to send data from your server to your users’ Android-powered device, and also to receive messages from devices on the same connection. The tool, implemented as an Eclipse RAP plug-in, will provide two main functionalities: (a) “push” information to the community of devices (communication server-client), and (b) “pop” notifications from a device and share this information with others. In this scenario, MyUniBG app will be extended in order to be the front-end for the new features.