When I build a web application, like most others, I simply build an admin area from which the client can control their site.
Most applications I build for android never require this kind of maintenance as they are all self contained. However Something I'm extremely curious about, say you build a cross platform application that does require constant maintenance; you've got 2 versions - an iOS and android version. What would be the best way to go about managing both applications from the same place?
For examples sake, let's say you build a real simple application. It could be something that once a day sends you a message, "hope you're day is going well" or "let me tell you a joke". Now what if those messages were hand typed and submitted to the applications, you want to log into a system, type the daily message in and both applications are simultaneously updated with the new message.
In my head I'm imagining you would need to build a dedicated admin system either as a web application or standalone desktop application that connects to the apps hosted database however I'm wondering about how well that would work, what kind of problems are you going to run Into, would it even be feesable?
I've never had to build something like this but some of the more recent web applications I've built would work well as straight forward applications and that just gets me thinking, if I was asked to turn them into apps that function the way they do already, what would be the best way?
It's something I'm really curious about and feel like I need to get my understanding on the right track.
I think you are describing an application for an admin that will set up (write) data to be used by users of Android and IOS apps. Few options:
Write the admin application as a regular web application. Be careful to use transactions in the code that writes to the database. That is to avoid inconsistent DB states when your admin applications DB writes interleave between mobile app reads. Also you have to secure the admin REST resources (API end points) for admin access only, so you would need authorization code in the app.
Write admin apps for the mobile platforms (or an admin section in the existing app that is properly authorized in the app code) and the server API end points. That is more tedious because of 2 platforms. Again you will need the DB transactions and authorization code
Write separate admin apps for mobile but with one framework (Xamarin). It will work for simple apps and yours sounds simple enough for Xamarin to work well.
Related
We are looking to rewrite a form-based application with a fairly tight time-scale (ideally, we would be launching the beta mid-July, and the final version by September). The current platform is showing its limitations and would require an exorbitant amount to bring into line with our requirements. As such, we are looking to bring the technology in-house, and writing our own solution.
Requirements:
Must be able to handle loss of network connectivity - the user may not always have internet access
Must have secure two-way communication with the server - the information being uploaded and downloaded can contain personal information, and it is imperative that we not be responsible for data-loss
Must be able to synchronise and update / remove records already on the tablet - the information can change, and the user must have access to information as "fresh" as possible
Must be able to store a large number of records (~1000+ records, a few kB each, so total 5+ MB) offline - depending on the tablet model, the user may only have internet access via wifi at the beginning and end of a day, so as many records as might be accessed should be downloaded and stored
Should be accessible on both iOS and Android
The solution we have currently is a form app, which fails heavily on point three, which is rapidly becoming a deal-breaker. The solutions that have been floated are:
An HTML5 website with offline capabilities, through the tablet's web browser
A website wrapped in an off-the-shelf app "shell" to provide offline capabilities, deployed through the app stores
A custom-built app (through Xamarin or similar) to be deployed through the app stores
Unfortunately, we are a company of desktop developers - we have no in-house experience with tablet applications currently. That being said, the application is tied very closely with several of our other products, so it would be difficult to outsource the development.
The question, therefore, is this:
As a mobile application developer, what approach would be "recommended" to build an offline-capable app that must communicate securely with a server when it can?
So for 5 mb of data that needed to be synchronized, I would build an web service from where you can get the data for your mobile application.
I prefer JSON Format for the data.
When your app logs in while internet connection, the app can fetch the complete data from the web service.
What I do then, is to compress or archive the json as file to the app internal filesystem.
Now there are only two scenarios for the app:
offline (login):
get the archived json file and do what you want with your data
online (login)
fetch the data again from the web service, archive it and then do what you want with your data
To synchronize the data back to the backend is not really mobile application stuff. You have to think about your architecture in the backend.
For security ensure you have ssl enabled for the connection to the web service.
I am native iOS developer but I build something similar with Symfony as Backend and three native applications (iOS, Android and Windows)
You could also use firebase as a backend, it really depends on your needs.
At the end, im just a stranger from the internet :) and normally when a customer needs an estimation, we really need time for such an estimation and to choose the right platforms that fits for the customer.
I am developing a voting application based on Android. This app will be used to create user accounts, receive notifications and caste vote.
I want to develop a back-end server for this application which will also have an Administrator interface to create new voting events. I want to know what all options I have to implement this project.
The server must maintain user account records in a secure manner, send out one-time-passwords from email, have sessions implemented for users logging in from the Android App, send out notifications about upcoming events to the app.
What back-end technology, database, parsing(for communication between server and android application), encryption(for secure communication) should I use to make this possible?
I also want to know how would I be able to host this server, both on a local virtual machine as well as on an online hosting.
The scope of your project is far too large if you're wanting sessions, administration views, E-mail integration, encryption, etc., without even knowing how it would all interact, or even what language to use.
As for what languages / services you would need, it varies for each task:
For administration views, you're probably looking at either ASP.NET or PHP with a CMS.
In terms of security, you'd want either MySQLi, or preferably, PDO. Make sure to read up on how to prevent things like LFI, RFI, SQLi, and XSS if you want semi-decent security.
Both ASP.NET and PHP can handle sessions, and they're fairly easy to understand in either language, so that wouldn't be too much of a concern.
While you can send out E-mails directly using scripts like PHP's mail() function, you probably want a system that can easily monitor things like how often users click on certain links, where the people who click the links are located, what campaigns are most effective, etc. For that, you'd want a service like MailChimp, Marketo, or Pardot.
As for how to have the back-end interact with the front-end, you're working with Android, so you're probably working with Java. That means you would be limited to functions like HttpMethod. Having said that, you can create plain HTML applications, or use a service like PhoneGap. In either of those situations, you have AJAX at your disposal, which will make things a lot easier.
For hosting, simply do a Google search for 'web hosting service'. There's literally thousands of decent hosts. Some have better pricing than others, but some have better features. I can't really recommend any brilliant ones, as they all meet different needs. To host locally, you'll want either IIS, or WAMP / LAMP depending on whether you are running Windows or Linux.
If you're not familiar with almost every term that I've mentioned, then the scope of your project is too large, and you'll definitely want to scale back.
I don't mean to scare you off, just making sure you're aware of just how difficult it would be to put all of that together :)
I am to build an android app that needs a central cloud storage (along with some server coding). My app is somewhat in the footsteps of
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.justyo
I mean i should be able to store a login and registration (possibly FB login in the future too). Then, i will also have to maintain and fetch users' 'friends' in the app along with a status (that can be changed any time by the friends).
I am not new with android dev. I also know ample amount of web development. However, i don't know the approach to this kind of an app that is to use some server side code and online db for android.
I have search a lot on the internet and have found a bunch of stuff, but i am just not getting the confidence as to which approach is what i need here.
Is there something pre-built and given by Google themselves?
Do i have to by a domain, deploy a hidden (UI-less) web service and access it through the android app?
is there a free option out there by google?
Is there a sample demonstration android app out there?
I don't need the code or anything. I am just confused; afraid of starting off in the wrong direction. Please answer so it is easy to understand.
Thank you in advance :)
There is the Google Cloud Platform, specifically App Engine. You can read the Docs here.
You dont't need to register a domain to use the platform. Yes, you will need to deploy a (not necessary UI-less) web service to the cloud, accessed from the Android client through endpoints. Additionally, the service is free up to certain limits.
Sample apps are available for deployment once you create a project from here.
Been researching it for a couple of days, and it seems quite impossible (though highly desired).
I'm Looking for a way to anonymously identify users on our website as they later on run our mobile apps (both iphone and android, actually). At the very basic level, I'd simply generate a UID when someone visits our site, plant a cookie on their device, and then retrieve it later when our app is run. This simple implementation seems to be impossible, because the apps don't get access to the same cookie-base as the browsers (which makes sense, privacy-wise).
Also thought about using HTML5 for this purpose, which doesn't seem to provide any solution.
I Tried going the other way around and using the device id as identifier. However, seems like device id won't be available to the web server when someone visits our site.
There seems to be a perfect disconnect between data accessible from the browser, and accessible from the device itself in native apps.
Has anyone ever found a solution for this scenario?
As of my experience what you seek is almost impossible to achieve for a third party developer.
As you mention, the web browser - by default - doesn't have file-system access from the javascript context (which is where your web app will most likely run) and the cookies infrastructure isn't exposed to the application context.
What you could do is to write a plugin to the browser which might enable this one way or another. But then there is the technicality that the browsers on mobile devices usually don't support plugins and even if they did; you can't force your web app users to install the plugin :-(
Yet another, and if possible even more unlikely solution would be to try to influence the device browser project (WebKit or whatever project you wish to target) community to implement the functionality for you (good luck) :-)
A third solution and perhaps even the ethically more correct one would be to allow the user to identify him/her self optionally when using your device client application. Your client iPhone/Android application would then have a "Identify me as a client user"-button. This would of course require you to allow the user to choose a key (an e-mail address?) of his/her own when entering the web app. You'd likely need to store the key on the web server opposed to the client browser cookies.
Hope this gives you some further ideas.
Cheers
Here are some things I think would work (untested):
You can check if the user has a google account login in the browser and on the phone.
Another way would be to have them log in in both apps
Register a special url-handler which opens your android-app with an user-identifier which gets called by the webapp (see this question)
Edit: I over-read the IPhone part - #1 and #3 those answers are Android only (I think).
I'm currently developing my first Android application and still in the designing stage trying to come up with a solid model.
My application will use the GCal data from a users Google calendar and sync it up with one or more other users to determine common meeting times between all without the tedious back and forth of scheduling over email.
I vision this working by storing each user and their calendar data in a database that will be refreshed daily. When a query to determine the optimal meeting times between a group is issued, I want to select the calendar data of each user from the database, perform the computation to find optimal times, and display the results back to the user who made the query.
The AWS SDK for Android supports Amazon SimpleDB and S3, in which case I would use SimpleDB for my database. Where I am getting lost is using the Amazon EC2 web service in concert with the SimpleDB to perform the computation.
First off, any feedback on my approach and/or design is appreciated.
Second, how does using non-Android, but Java based APIs/SDKs effect applications, or is it even possible to do so?
The API typica for Java looks interesting and useful if it is possible to use with Android for instance.
Thanks!
So, I think its important to note a couple of things.
What you are describing is not an 'android application'. Its a web service application with an android client. The reason I'm being pedantic is that many of the design decisions you need to make are completely besides the fact that your primary client will run on android.
I'm concerned about the viability of storing the users calendar in a non-relation database. I don't know if you've already looked through this, but the problem you are trying to solve (calendaring) seems like it would benefit from the relational benefits of a relational database. For instance, i'm not sure how you would structure for storage the data of past, present and future events/meetings in a non-relational. Its probably possible, but i'm not sure if its optimal. Depending on the amount of data you may also need to consider the maximum record size.
While its true that AWS SDK for android supports writing to S3 or SimpleDB, I think there is a lot to consider. The reason you are confused about the interaction with EC2 is that normally, your EC2 web service will be interacting with S3 or SimpleDB. By using the AWS SDK you can, in theory, remove the requirement for a web service. My main issue with that is that you're now forced to do lots more on each client because there is no common access pattern. Your ios client or web client needs to have all the same logic that your android client has to make sure its accessing your s3 and simple db data the same. If that doesn't make sense i can elaborate.
Using non-android api's and sdks is a mixed bag. Sometimes it works fine if the classes compile to Davlik. If they don't it doesn't work.
One thing I might point out, since you'll already possibly be tied to a Google technology is Google App Engine. The nice part about it is that there is a free level of service which lets you get your app up and running without cost. Based on the technologies you are suggesting, it might be something for you to look into. Other than that, my other strong suggestion is that you focus on building out the web service first and independently of the android client. Take the time to model what the client server interaction would be and move as much of the 'logic' to the server as is possible. Thats what I felt like was missing from your initial description. Where the crunching would be.
my solution is that you use O-O principles. store your db on amazon dynamoDB and then sync user data with the mobile app. then you do processing of the data/computation on the device before displaying the results