Push notifications via Telegram

On June 25, Telegram opened a platform for bots . My first thought was - you can send notifications through it! Using telegram notifications, you can solve several problems at once, at least partially:

IOS support
Windows Phone Support
Receive notifications without installing unnecessary applications

Thus, PushAll can now send notifications to Android, Chrome and Telegram devices via a bot.

Under the cutter, a little setup instructions and development details. (a small instruction for those who are going to make the same bot)

Bind

You just need to open the link - telegram.me/PushAllBot and write anything to the bot.
In response, he will give a link on which you need to go to establish communication.

After the transition, you will be prompted to log in if you have not logged in yet, or a message will be displayed that the device is connected.

Among the disadvantages of this method of admission are:

Failure to further modify notifications
Inability to track delivery (maybe temporarily)
Inability to send an icon to a message (transferring an image file with a so-so option each time)

Technical details

Everything works quite simply.
There is API documentation here.
I created the bot with the / newbot command and followed the instructions, then set the piccu with the / setuserpic command.
Using the received token, I bound Webhook to receive messages.
Here you need to understand one small thing: if you work with PHP you will not get the data in the $ _POST variable.
JSON data can be obtained using the command:

file_get_contents('php://input')

And then you can parse the JSON response.
Sending goes by chat ID. It is equal to the user ID.
I did not find any restrictions on the use of the API or the number of messages sent. Therefore, this function will be tested for a long time. At a minimum, I do not like that for each message you need to make a separate request. This means that I either have to do them in several streams of several hundred per second, or do them in turn. And the processing of each takes about 50-100 ms, which is long enough. If there are any restrictions there, I may run into a problem when I can send out 1000 notifications in just a few minutes.

This is how Webhook works for me:

$gram=json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'),true);
$message='Привет, '
.$gram['message']['chat']['last_name'].' '
.$gram['message']['chat']['first_name'].'. Твой ID в Telegram: '
.$gram['message']['chat']['id'];
file_get_contents('https://api.telegram.org/botTOKEN/sendMessage?chat_id='
.$gram['message']['chat']['id'].'&text='
.urlencode($message));

It seems to me that you can make good bots for blind chat. When the interlocutors do not know anything about each other. Through Redis do the interaction. When you receive a message through Webhook, send a message to another person waiting for the message. After creating a connection, forward messages using different chat_id users.

Telegram's API turned out to be very simple. No developer accounts and the like are needed. You create a bot immediately get a token, immediately work with the API.

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