Building an app - infrastructure question

[Saga]

I'm coding an app with a couple friends from work and while we're chugging along on the programming language, we're a little lost when it comes to infrastructure.

Mainly, we want to send push notifications to other phones, have people log in (either via Facebook or by creating an account) and have users maintain a list of groups pulled from either their contact list (a la Snapchat) or their Facebook friends.

We'll probably piggyback off Facebook messenger for communication between two people, but what kind of database or server infrastructure are we looking at with the above proposed setup? We're all new to this and admittedly far off from anything resembling a complete project, but we'd like to keep some of these items in mind as we're working our way through the design and coding process.

[octopus]

What platform?

Edit: Anyway, assuming Android...

- Push notification - look into GCM: http://developer.android.com/google/gcm/index.html
- Facebook API - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/
- Contacts API - http://developer.android.com/guide/t...-provider.html

For backend, you can probably just use a LAMP setup. Just go to Amazon Web Services and make a free tier EC2 server for development: http://aws.amazon.com/free/
When you're ready to go production, use a higher tier server when you get more traffic.

[Saga]

Sorry, Android.

Thanks for the resources, I'll definitely forward that to my buddies and look into it.

[Skotty]

It seems like your group is new to development so I will add that you could also look into Heroku and Azure for your backend. The advantage here is that the servers are maintained by the host so you don't have to worry about patching and updating your server. All 3 have easy options for scaling when needed though.

If sending the push notifications to other phones is a core feature you'll need to set that up soon.

[Saga]

We're planning it to be a core feature, yeah. What needs to be set up for configuring push notifications? I found this tutorial on using Parse to send push notifications: https://parse.com/tutorials/android-push-notifications

Is there a good list of object/service prioritization out there somewhere? Like an Android app designer checklist? Ideally I'd like all of our back end configured first. Right now we're literally zipping up our project, sending it to each other and importing into Eclipse ADT or pasting the XML in our existing project.

[octopus]

Get source control set up. On bitbucket.org you can get a free private Git repository that both of you can sync to. Zipping projects back and forth is not a good idea.

Also, why don't you use Android Studio (IntelliJ)? It's much better imo than using Eclipse.

[Saga]

I mean, we played around with both. Eclipse with ADT still has a visual editor, and we were having some issues doing basic shit in AS like changing the OS version the project published as, despite multiple guides being available online. I also had to suddenly reimport Google Play's API since my Android constructors suddenly stopped working after saving, closing and later reopening a project. Given that it's in beta it just seemed like more trouble than it was worth. Maybe I'm wrong.