Don Park

**This is an old revision of the document!**

Pigeon is the name of the service/background task in the android client.

InBound messages:
  once:
   onCreate()
   onStart()
   onBind()

  repeating:
   notification_status_update - every 30 second heartbeat timer
   onLocationChanged() - GPS notifications from android, sent whenever with a frequency hint from the app.

The next step (2008Dec9) is to consume GeoRSS feeds and display them on the map. The pigeon should do the polling and hold the result data so that it can set off a vibration proximity alarm, etc..

That means the Radar activity, which has the UI, will have to use the pigeon interface to manage the list of RSS URLs.

 New API methods:
  addGeoRssUrl(String url)
  removeGeoRssUrl(String url)
  array GeoRssUrls()
  array GeoRssItemsFrom(String url)  

I would like a way for the pigeon service to notify the app if its running when new updates arrive, but i dont know how to do that, so the app will poll pigeon with the GeRssItemsFrom(String url). The functionality is necessary even with service-to-app messaging for the case when the app first starts.