Snow Leopard™ Server

Chapter 33. Push Notification Server

In This Chapter

• Introduction to Push Notification Server

• Planning push notification services

• Push Notification Server setup and configuration

• Managing and monitoring Push Notification Server

Push notification is a new feature of Snow Leopard Server designed to provide efficient, rapid notifications to clients when new information is available for access.

Although potentially useful for a variety of purposes, push notification in Snow Leopard is primarily provided to deliver push messaging features to the mail and iCal services.

Push notification is particularly useful to mobile devices — which seek to balance rapid access to new information, such as incoming emails or calendar changes — because of their limited battery size, a factor that puts a damper on how often they can ask for new data.

If the client device checks for new messages only every 15 minutes, it's occasionally 15 minutes late in discovering an urgent new message. If it polls more frequently than that, it wastes a lot of battery power because most of the time, the client connects to the network to ask for new data and finds nothing new.

The solution to this engineering challenge is push messaging, which lets a mobile device coast in low-power mode until new information is available on the server. The server then initiates a notification to the client, letting the client obtain the new information promptly and efficiently.

With push messaging, mobile devices spend the resources to connect ...