I'm hoping to use Azure's AppFabric ServiceBus to host a Publish/Subscribe messaging system. My clients will all be mobile devices (android, Iphone etc...) running hybrid applications.
My question is: can my mobile clients receive messages from a publisher hosted in Azure? I don't really care much about the message format at this point (Soap, XML, Json). I care more about the bi-directional communication at this point.
The answer today is kinda. You can always use queues or MessageBuffers to communicate between .NET and non .NET clients. This is effectively an HTTP poll and is REST based. However, to use the .NET SOAP binding which does 'push' based communication for active clients, you must have the .NET stack in there. My understanding is this is currently due to differences in TCP framing that make other implementations non-compatible.
Keep in mind that most mobile clients use a long HTTP poll operation for notifications. This is how Exchange works on Windows Mobile devices and I believe WP7 has something similar for notifications. To truly work well with battery life on mobile devices, you might have to adopt the techniques there. That has nothing to do with AppFabric Service Bus.
