Can Amazon Simple Notification Service “push” notifications to a desktop client?

Question

Can Amazon Simple Notification Service "push" notifications to a desktop client? It this possible as a true push without polling?

Answer 1

No, this is not (yet) available out of the box - Amazon SNS indeed works by publishers sending messages to topics, which in turn push these to endpoints subscribed to this topic. The currently available protocols for the Subscribe API are:

• http -- delivery of JSON-encoded message via HTTP POST
• https --delivery of JSON-encoded message via HTTPS POST
• email -- delivery of message via SMTP
• email-json -- delivery of JSON-encoded message via SMTP
• sms -- delivery of message via SMS [currently limited to the US region(s)]
• sqs -- delivery of JSON-encoded message to an Amazon SQS queue

So the closest you currently have for push notifications to a desktop client is email, though it should be relatively easy to build custom ones by posting HTTP to a respective web service, which in turn could facilitate WebSocket or Growl etc.

Good luck!