Mesibo Real-time APIs

Mesibo real-time API allows users to communicate in real-time by providing APIs for

• 1-to-1 messaging
• group messaging
• voice and video calls.

In this section, we will explore these real-time APIs in detail. In addition to these real-time APIs, mesibo provides various other utility APIs for example, listen to network events etc

Key Components

There are three key components of Mesibo real-time APIs

• Functions, which you can invoke. For example, to send a message, make a call etc
• Listeners, which mesibo will invoke for various events. For example, when you receive a message, receive an incoming call etc. You can listen to these listners to get real-time notifications of events.
• Data Stuctures, various data structures used in functions and listeners

API Signatures

All the APIs have exactly the same name and parameters across the platform, unless specified. They only differ in the way they have been called in Java (Android), Objective-C (iOS) and Swit (iOS). For example,

On Android

mesibo.setPath(path)

On IOS

Objective-C

[mesiboInstance setPath:path];

Swift

mesibo.getInstance().setPath(path)

This makes it easy for you to write cross-platform code across platform. In following sections, we will only describe APIs with name and parameters.

Initialization

You need to call one or more initialization API before using any other mesibo APIs.

Messaging

Sending messages using mesibo API only requires initializing MesssageParams object and invoke one of the messaging API with it, message id and message itself.

Message ID is 32-bit unique id. It will be converted into a 64-bit globally unique id by the system. The id which you have originally passed will be preserved in the lower 32-bit of the globally unique id. For example, if you send a message with id 0x12345678, it will be converted into global id 0xXXXXXXXX12345678 while sending message to the receiver.

Message Management

These set of APIs deal with managing stored messages in the database and sending read receipts.

To read stored messages from the database, you need to tell mesibo about a set of messages you need to read; for example, all messages, OR messages from a sender, OR for a particular group, OR messages matching a search query etc. This can be achieved by setting a read session. Once you set a read session, you can start reading messages by calling read() api.

You can enable automatic sending of read receipts every time you read a message. This can be achieved by setting a read session with READ_RECEIPT flag. On reading or receiving a message, read receipts will be be automatically send if

- Sending Read Receipt is enabled while setting reading session, AND - Read receipt requested by the sender, AND - A new real-time or database message matches the read session.

Any messages read will have the status READ instead of NEW.

File Transfer

Sending files is no different than sending plain messages. All you need to do is to first upload the file to a server and then send the URL and thumbnail [optional] using mesibo in real-time. The receiver then downloads it using that URL.

mesibo provides you set of APIs to abstract out the entire process and also let you choose how and where to store your files; for example, Amazon Cloud, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Akamai or your own servers.

To start a file transfer (download or upload), you must initialize a FileInfo object and pass it to sendFile() or startFileTransfer() API. However, instead of creating this object manually, mesibo provides getFileInstance() API, which checks if an existing file transfer for this particular URL (download) or the file (upload) is in progress and if so, returns that object instead of creating a new object. This highly optimizes sending a file by avoid sending duplicate files.

User Profile Management [Optional]

You can create and associate a social profile for every known peers or groups. mesibo will set profile fields in MessageParams every time you receive a message from those peers.

Networking, Timings and other Utility APIs

Filesystem APIs