I have started working on a university project. I have to test various REST frameworks for Android and see which one is the most efficient/stable currently.
Which are most popular REST frameworks currently for Android? I have heard about Spring.
Secondly, how do you create a RESTful service for Android?
There a number of REST libraries that do more or less for you. Arguably, the most popular for Android are Retrofit (https://github.com/square/retrofit) and my personal favourite RoboSpice (https://github.com/stephanenicolas/robospice) for two simple reasons: runs as a service and works alongside Activity lifecycle.
Answering which one is the best would start a flame war.
Keep in mind that ANY library that can do a HTTP request with POST and GET can be "weaponised" as RESTful library, it's only a matter of how much boilerplate you want to write on your own and how much control over each aspect you require.
Related
Disclaimer. I'm asking this on someone else's behalf and given that I know as much about Android development as penguins about flight, it may be clumsy. In such case, let me know and I'll remove it or try to reformulate.
I've created a web service that's reachable at the URL on the following form.
http://server/Blopp.svc/Store/value1/value2
The back-end part I've got covered but I'm worried about the front-end development. I've got a colleague that's making the app and he's got the rudimentary GUI done. However, in order not to do a lot of convoluted coding, he's heard that there's a certain library for making such URL calls.
What's the name of it? Is there certain other aspects to take into consideration or is there an (almost) standard one that everybody uses?
Please not that the app's functionality is at the moment limited to providing the web service with data. All the logic and presentation is done on the website and not inside the app.
I've never built up an Android app, so I'm asking for understanding if this is a dumb formulation. I just want to help my co-worker and he seemed to struggle with the details.
Is there perhaps a smoother way to make the call to a web service if I substitute the patter of the URL to use query strings? Any other approach that makes it easier for an Android developer? I'm not familiar with the area but I want to make things easy for my team-mate.
There are quite a few different HTTP libraries available and it would really depend on your specific requirements which one you used (if any - you can roll your own HTTP requests using HttpURLConnection) Two of the more popular ones are:
Volley
http://developer.android.com/training/volley/index.html
Written by one of the guys on the Google Play team and part of the AOSP. Very flexible and easy to use however I would hesitate to recommend it as it relies on the now deprecated Apache Http classes in its public API.
Retrofit
http://square.github.io/retrofit/
From Square. Version 2 is currently in late stages of beta. It allows you to define your API as an interface. It has dependancies on their OkHttp library as well. Very fast and also has RxJava support baked in.
I'm currently developing an Android application and I'd like to have an scalable architecture with a clean separation of concerns. The requirements of this application are, mainly:
User autentication (I'm dealing now with Google Sign-In for Android after many unsuccessful fights agains Android Identity Toolkit)
Synchronization with REST services (this application should be collaborative, I've already done a proof of concept to consume a "heartbeat" service, using AsyncService, that was the only way I've found to clean activies code, I got to that library researching about Robust Android Architectures)
ORM at client side to store user generated data and retrieved data in the future (my choice has been ORMLite for Android)
Material Design (as the best approach to the UI I have in mind)
First of all I'd like advices on how to separate classes inside the project, I mean, should I use folders (activity, model, DAL, service, sync...) or should I create my own libraries? (in .Net I'd create libraries with parent namespace)
My second and biggest concern is about user identity: how should looks like my architecture to achieve my goals? (sign up / Sign in with multiple providers, authenticated rest client and synchronization using SyncAdapter)
I hope you don bane this quiestion because maybe is too generic but I ask about all this stuff because I couldn't find information or advices about this stuff.
Thank you in advance.
This is a generic question and every dev has his own way to achieve this, but I would recommend to follow one of the trending patterns right now.
There is a project call the clean architecture. It has pretty much everything from dB to Api. In my opinion is a over-engineered.
I prefer another pattern called Flux.
Together with retrofit, eventbus or Otto makes building apps easy and keep the structure
You can read more about it here:
http://lgvalle.xyz/2015/08/04/flux-architecture/
I am looking forward to build a mobile application, android for now but will be extendable to iOS and also a Web app. I am planning to build a common backend and use REST and expose the API's which will be consumed from different applications.
I am looking for suggestions for a technology stack best suitable for this kind of architecture?
I would strongly suggest Nancy. The main advantage being that it is super easy to set up and it does all the things you would normally expect from a REST service. JSON serialization, routes, parameters etc...
And you can code it in C# .NET, without having to write the boilerplate code that is usually necessary to get this sort of simple functionality running.
I'm going to develope an application based on web services (axis2) and android (clients).
I'm now planning the logic architecture for my system and I supose that it should be like a SOA architecture. I have seen that a SOA architecture is based on layers.
So, this would be a "correct" logic architecture for my application? (with some changes of course)
http://geeks.ms/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/unai/DDD_5F00_NLAYER_5F00_ARCHITECTURE_5F00_SMALL_5F00_6ADA95E1.png
Android code (activities) would be on Presentation Layer?
EDIT
April 2014
Now, 3 years later with some more experience... REST is the best :)
Warning, it may that this answer is not at all an answer to you question but anyway, here is my thoughts.
I'm definitely not a SOA specialist but since SOA can be implemented with REST, it should not have any consequences on a SOA architecture. Android is REST-ready (see that Google IO 2010 session on REST) and there is only little SOAP support on android (afaik, but I may be wrong).
At some point, you'll have to evaluate the feasibility of the interop. between your Axis WS-* with any existing android SOAP support (the well-known ksoap2 project for example). The result could be not without impact on your architecture design.
The point here is: if you do use Rampart to use WS-Security, for example, on top of Axis2, it seems to me there are little chances that ksoap may interact at all (technically) with your service provider. On the one hand, if the service is simple and can be bound with ksoap2, great, go on. On the other hand, if you would use a not so simple security or authentication scheme, it could just be a nightmare to get the things done with the simple SOAP support on android. In the latest case and as the REST approach seems to be the preferred philosophy on android, you may be confronted to the decision to have a REST proxy dedicated to android between your Axis2 business WS and the android client-side application.
In the hope it may be of any help.
Perhaps you could even try SOAP. Android supports SOAP web services and provides ksoap2 libraries which you can use for sending request and getting response from your server easily.
For starters just check this out. Now, the latest version of ksoap also supports passing of Object Arrays.
For more information of ksoap2, I suggest to read this
Cheers
All the best
I want to build a server that communicates with an android phone
based on a request/response model
At first i thought i will use Httpservlets and communicate with the android
by Http messages. but i need to be able to access a pretty big object with every
request so i guess i cant really transfer the object to the servlet.
so i know this is a pretty newbish question but iv'e been searching for days
what kind of java EE tech should i use(i thought of EJB but as i understand they cant communicate with android)?
Thanks in advance
I think the right question is how to implement service layer for your android application:
Basically there are two options REST based web services and SOAP. Android's support for SOAP is inadequate and I personally prefer REST over soap any day. If you have decided to go with REST, your options in Java are Jersey, RESTlets or Spring Rest services. I will prefer Jersey, but you can also look in to Spring ( although not strictly complaint with the JSR).
(note: look in "SO" for comparison on various rest based frameworks in Java)