Google cloud messaging GCM through proxy

Question

I am having trouble sending a message to a device through the company proxy.
I have done the GCM tutorial on the google site and have successfully registered a device on the google servers with the android emulator, and also on the server at my end.
For this I had to go through the company proxy, setting it in the access point of the emulator. Now the problem I have is sending a message from my server to the device through the same proxy. I am using the servlet code from the demo which uses the

com.google.android.gcm.server.Sender

helper class to send the message.

I am running the servlets on tomcat 7.

I have tried setting the proxy up in the catalina.properties file like so.

http.proxyHost=proxy.company.com  
http.proxyPort=8080

And I have tried setting properties inside the servlet itself like below.

System.setProperty("http.proxyHost", "proxy.company.com");  
System.setProperty("http.proxyPort", "8080"); 

But still I get the timeout. I know its the company proxy because I got the messaging working at home where I have no proxy.

I have seen a proxy object created in the java code and then a connection created with it, but I dont think that is usable here since I am using Sender helper class to send the message.

This is the line that fails in a timeout.

Result result = sender.send(message, registrationId, 5);

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards

Bill

Answer 1

Alright, I finally have it working. In my comment I mentioned that I had succeeded in sending out the message, but the emulator was not recieving it. I had forgotten to follow my own earlier advice and run the emulator from the command line with the proxy parameters set like so:

emulator.exe -avd avd22google -http-proxy proxy.company.com:8080 -debug-proxy

So to summarise, my initial problem was that I had registered the emulator on the with GCM and with my local server, but the when I clicked send message I was getting a timeout.

I initially thought it was the firewall so I did some research and set up the proxy in tomcats catalina.properties file. This made no difference.

I used the "Charles" web proxy debugger software to see where the message was attempting to be sent to and it came up with https://android.googleapis.com:443

So I initially I added the following to my catalina.properties file:

https.proxyHost=proxy.company.com  
https.proxyPort=443

It still did not work. A colleague of mine told me that our company proxy handles all types of requests through port 8080, so I changed the the poort line to:

https.proxyPort=8080

This allowed the message to be sent out. But then the message was not getting through to the emulator and I was receiving the following error in LogCat.

[GTalkConnection.12] doConnect: caught XMPPError connecting to mtalk.google.com:5228.: -- caused by: java.net.SocketException: The operation timed out

Then I remembered that you need to start the emulator with the command line to get it to use the proxy. Once I did this a flood of messages appeared on my emulator!

So I finally have it working end to end. It's taken me about a week to get GCM fully working within my company firewall, so hopefully this post can help some other poor sod doing this in the future.

cheers

Bill