Yes, but not directly and you'll have to poll for messages on a timer...
In the Product Details page under the heading "Flexible", you'll see that none of the currently supported formats/transports can be hosted in the browser.
However... Amazon SQS is one of the supported transports, and it in turn can be accessed from JavaScript - see an example app here: http://aws.amazon.com/code/Amazon-SQS/1254. (The example shows JavaScript accessing SQS).
You'd have to manually poll though, as there is no "push" to the browser with SQS.
(Alternatively, you could do it all server-side, and then you could use potentially use websockets to push the messages to the browser.)
SNS is a distributed publish-subscribe system. Messages are pushed to subscribers as and when they are sent by publishers to SNS.
SQS is distributed queuing system. Messages are not pushed to receivers. Receivers have to poll or pull messages from SQS. Messages can't be received by multiple receivers at the same time. Any one receiver can receive a message, process and delete it. Other receivers do not receive the same message later. Polling inherently introduces some latency in message delivery in SQS unlike SNS where messages are immediately pushed to subscribers. SNS supports several end points such as email, SMS, HTTP end point and SQS. If you want unknown number and type of subscribers to receive messages, you need SNS.
You don't have to couple SNS and SQS always. You can have SNS send messages to email, SMS or HTTP end point apart from SQS. There are advantages to coupling SNS with SQS. You may not want an external service to make connections to your hosts (a firewall may block all incoming connections to your host from outside).
Your end point may just die because of heavy volume of messages. Email and SMS maybe not your choice of processing messages quickly. By coupling SNS with SQS, you can receive messages at your pace. It allows clients to be offline, tolerant to network and host failures. You also achieve guaranteed delivery. If you configure SNS to send messages to an HTTP end point or email or SMS, several failures to send message may result in messages being dropped.
SQS is mainly used to decouple applications or integrate applications. Messages can be stored in SQS for a short duration of time (maximum 14 days). SNS distributes several copies of messages to several subscribers. For example, let’s say you want to replicate data generated by an application to several storage systems. You could use SNS and send this data to multiple subscribers, each replicating the messages it receives to different storage systems (S3, hard disk on your host, database, etc.).
Best Answer
You can create a new SNS topic such as
push-notification-failuresand then associate your APNS/APNS_SANDBOX applications' "Delivery Failures" event to it. Subscribe to the event via email (and confirm) and you'll get useful debugging information about failures. This can all be accomplished through the SNS console and doesn't require API calls to perform.It is probably worth it to subscribe an HTTP endpoint to this SNS topic and record all delivery failures so you have historical data to work from and debug production issues.
For example a delivery
FailureMessageof "Platform token associated with the endpoint is not valid" means that you're sending a message from APNS_SANDBOX to an APNS registered device or vice versa. This can mean that you have the wrong APNS settings for your build system. (We have a frustrating problem of developer built binaries using APNS_SANDBOX vs. TestFlight built binaries using APNS for local testing and QA which is what led me down this path.)