Urban Airship push testing cordova app

Rationale:

The Urban Airship (UA) push alert support being added to medley presents some barriers to the standard development and QA workflow, and this app is designed to overcome those barriers.

When the UA support is in production, the API that is used to trigger a push notification from a breaking news alert requires credentials and application key information. This is supplied to the UA push service to validate the UA account, and to identify the specific devices that will be targeted.

These production credentials will (according to the current plan) be owned by the individual media properties (are the normal same market group of properties) rather than by CMG Digital. These credentials and need to be controlled by the media property personnel, rather than by CMG Digital personnel. That makes it difficult to create a reliable plan for ensuring that test messages can be sent to test devices without any risk of sending test alerts to production end users.

Another point is the difficulty of using the production mobile app to test the medley UA integration feature. The app will have its own production lifecycle with new version coming out periodically. It is also not designed to provide simple validation of push messages. Also, using test apps for iOS can be tricky and maintenance prone.

This app was built to avoid or mitigate these factors. It provides a simple and direct validation that push messages arrive and a visual mechanism for inspecting the full contents of the messages. It can be used under UA with a different US credential set and app ID than any production versions. This will allow the development and testing of push API integration features in medley without any danger of accidentally messaging end users, and without the need for CMG Digital personnel to have access to production credentials owned by media properties.

The simplest use case for this app is for the developer or QA person who needs to test UA push to load it on an Android device that is in their physical possession. Any messages sent using the development/QA credentials will reach this device.

In order to simplify the process of testing that the test app itself is working, there is a python push sender in "push.py". When supplied with the right credentials, this simple python script will create a simulated medley alert message and sending it using the UA push service API (emulating the medley functionality). If this works, i.e. if running it delivers a push to the device on which the test client was installed, then the test client is working and the credentials and app ID are correct. Any failure to deliver from medley is therefore likely to be a problem with the medley integration (or usual problems such as no celery queue workers running).

A further feature is available that may be of use for various testing scenarios. There is a companion web service designed to accept forwarded records of the delivered push messages. The app has a "bounce server" feature that allows the user to enter the address of a server of this kind and enable forwarding to it. If the user does this, then leaves the app running on the device, then any subsequent push messages will be forwarded to all configured bounce servers. By configuring a test device and leaving it plugged in to a charger, it would be possible for anyone to then use that device to perform either manual or automated testing of the push feature by monitoring the delivery of push messages to the "bounce server(s)".

The bounce server is an extremely simple django app that was developed with heroku hosting in mind, which is free at the scale level required by this app. It is available at https://github.com/dlparker/pushmirror