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How does one set up a development server for mobile apps?
In web development developers usually install XAMPP and then use localhost to communicate with the server and test in a safe environment. This is a free and fast working solution, since it requires very little or no upload time. What is an equivalent for mobile developers on the iOS or Android platform? Some kind of localhost for mobile app developers.
The goal is to develop a backend for a mobile app in a safe and quick environment. Their exact equivalent for web developers is using localhost.
Example: The user registers. Username and password along with an image are sent to the server and stored in the database. The next time the user logs in the server looks up in the database and serves the correct image to the user and logs him/her in.
I am not asking for how to program this or what code to use. I am asking for instructions to a set up developer test environment - a localhost for mobile apps, if such a thing exists.
As you mentioned, web developers, can quickly set your localhost by installing XAMPP or any equivalent web server, a database server like MySQL on localhost. They put their web services on a web server and call or use them from the front end (HTML page) on user actions like form submissions, button clicks, etc.
Mobile application development with Android is very much similar to the above approach. All web services lie at the back end, and you only call them from an Android client (mobile device) using the HttpClient or HttpUrlConnection class.
You can make only HTTP requests from a mobile application and get a response from the services which are called, parse the response and populate the UI elements.
You can set up your localhost with a database server, a web server as you mentioned correctly above. Now to make a request from your mobile device to localhost, keep your device and localhost machine on the same network (you can put both devices on the same Wi-Fi network) so that you can directly make requests to your localhost from your mobile application. You will get a response in the mobile app in whichever format you have provided and use it. This is very similar to that of web application, where you can imagine your UI lying in mobile device which was an HTML page in a web application.
Assuming that you have a web server / server application installed on your machine, then the requirement is that the device and server can communicate.
This is normally done using the HttpURLConnection class. You will need the IP address of your server in order to construct your URL, that is instead of accessing your server application using localhost/myapp you will need to add the url 192.168.0.255/my app (or whatever your actual IP address is).
There are a couple of issues to watch out for. Your development machine must accept incoming http requests (port 80 normally) through the firewall, and your router must allow the traffic between the machine and the device. Have a look at http://portforward.com/ if you are having trouble with this. If you are having trouble diagnosing the issues, then sometimes downloading a terminal app on the device can help.
Sometimes cheap routers or corporate policies make this difficult. In this case you can try setting up a portable hotspot or creating an ad-hoc network if your server machine also has a wireless network adapter.
If you're developing a mobile app then I would think you want to keep focussed on the mobile development part and therefore mock out the backend rather than write a working server with a database, logic, etc.
In very simple cases I would recommend using something such as Charles. This allows you to intercept requests in and out of your mobile app either from the simulator or device and validate everything is working as expected at a call by call level. If you want something more persistent then using a simple web framework in your language of choice with fixed responses would do the job well. For example, Sinatra for Ruby or Express.js for Node.js. And then rather than worrying about having a database to maintain and seed, just return fixed JSON responses for a particular call or a file from disk. This could then be committed with your mobile development code repositories and used as part of test suites.
Related
I have made a rest api with database for an Android app. I have made this in php in my localhost. Now I want to access it from my Android app. How can I access it through URL in internet. I am totally new to this, plz give me in details.
This question, brings back so much memories. You need to tunnel your local host packets to the public internet. There are many tools, but the main one i use is NgRok.
Details
Test mobile apps against a development backend running on your machine. Point ngrok at your local dev server and then configure your app to use the ngrok URL. It won't change, even when you change networks.
Don’t constantly redeploy your in-progress work to get feedback from clients. ngrok creates a secure public URL (https://yourapp.ngrok.io) to a local webserver on your machine. Iterate quickly with immediate feedback without interrupting flow.
A note of interest. if your app currently as a https signed certificate you might need to add some extra classes, if not you good to go. Read up here.
Guide lines for local public hosting.
Create your webserver(php,node.js etc) , start it, and verify on localhost:port
Start ngrok, its simple visit the website, the instructions are there
Ngrok will give you a url, that url is public anyone can access it, while your computer is powered on
On android side, use a http client, such as Volley, Http2 or Retrofit.
You have a few reading up to do
I want to develop a system in which data is being shared between DESKTOP app and Android app.
After searching I have found that I need a server in between them. But I can't figure out what the server is? How do I create it? And how will it help me connect my two platform devices?
Desktop App will receive data from android app. And manage data. It will also be used to send notifications/messages to android apps.
Android App will be used to input data and send it to desktop app. It will receive updates/notifications from desktop app.
Now how do I connect these two? I basically need a common database for real-time data sharing and notifications.
Edit: I am building the desktop app using C# and android app using Java.
Edit2: Maybe I can host the database on CPANEL or 000webhost using PHP. And then connect it with both android and C#. Is this the correct way to do it? Is it possible to connect it with C#? I know it can be connected with Android, not sure about C#.
You don't necessarily need a database. You need a common network protocol between two applications.
All network communication is done via sockets. You need a library that allows you send data over sockets. For example, here's an Android guide that is about sockets.
A socket binds to a specific port of a computer, essentially making it a "server". Much like how web servers all expose port 80, and communicate over a protocol called HTTP. Which is important because it is up to you to decide what protocol your applications communicate between each other, because the socket just sends bytes - it doesn't care what you send or how, as long as it travels to a port on a particular server. It also won't parse the data for you, that's up to your application to handle. For example, how would your desktop app know the Android device sent it a text message, or some image to be displayed, or an address to show a map?
All in all, your reason for wanting a desktop application rather than a web application is not entirely clear. Parsing only the body of HTTP payloads from different HTTP paths that are mapped to different methods (which is typically referred to as a REST API) is much simpler than building your own protocol. You might as well build a desktop GUI over top of a web server.
Making the desktop app send updates back to your mobile application is basically impossible using a bi-directional socket architecture. Your Android should not be running an open server socket continuously just for your application, mostly because battery drain, but because its network address is subject to change frequently, and you therefore additionally need a registration server from which your device would reconnect to. Such a service exists as Firebase Cloud Messaging, which is a rebranding of the GCM technology made by Google, and it can be used to send push notifications to devices, but only with small data payloads.
See here about what activities occur on an Android device for notifications. How does push notification technology work on Android?
Back to the question about databases. Suggesting one to use is too broad. And you only need one of those if you want to store and/or query or join datasets. The same computer running the desktop app can install and run whatever flavor of database you prefer, whether it's a relational database or noSQL database, entirely up to you. The only realtime databases I know of are RethinkDB and Firebase.
You could also just hold a SQLite file which is as good as a small scale database (even the SQLite documentation recommends it for low traffic web sites).
Firebase supports web interface, so you can develop html code and integrate in desktop app, something like web integration in windows form application
I want to have multiple clients that connect to a server over LAN and access/modify the mySQL database in the server.
How would i go about doing this? Can you guys provide some resources/links that i could research on the topic
To answer your question, you should be able to connect to a mysql database by adding the jdbc driver to your project as a jar file in Android Studio.
Now for a real app that you plan to distributed to thousands of users there are Security issues, Performance issues, and Scalability issues.
Security issues:
You expose your database directly to the internet by opening its port to public access for the apps to connect. A web app adds a layer in the middle, keeping the database access inside the intranet.
You expose your data directy to the public by providing at least one public account known by everybody (I assume this would be the way to access because managing one account per user wouldn't be realistic). A Web app isolates the user account from the database accounts.
By providing access this way, as android mobile devices can be rooted, you are potentially granting anonymous access to your data.
Performance Issues:
With a web app in the middle, it is the webapp who manages the
connections to the database. This enables sharing connections
amongst different users vs. one dedicated connection per user would
have if the different devices estable separate connections.
For the same reason, you can't take advantage of connection pooling,
which saves the overhed of establishing a connection to the database
for each incoming request.
Scalability issues:
As connections are not shared the number of concurrent users will be bound to the number of connections you can open at the same time to the database.
EDIT 1
I am adding an alternative I thought of which involves using a web application but it is not implemented using a webserver. It is a java NIO framework that runs on its own. The limitations of this solution is you need shell access to the server and java, which is not common in traditional hostings. Checkout Netty.
There are 2 ways how to do perform your task. You can either add the JDBC driver in android studio, or better implement a REST API that connects to your database, and all the android clients can send HTTP requests to the server and the server will add the information for you. Here you can implement the create, update, delete methods. For HTTP requests you can use Retrofit or Volley libraries.
If you want to use JDBC, check out the answer here How to Mysql JDBC Driver to android studio
But the best and most correct solution for this type of problems would be a REST Service
In the long run, you really need a "client" application between "users" and the database. It is usually done via a webserver, plus PHP/Java/VB/.... Yes, it requires you learn yet another language, but that is not something to avoid in a serious application.
The client can help (and hurt, if done adequately) with security. The client can insulate users from database changes, which will eventually happen. The client should 'abstract' the interface to the DB so that the users do not have to be SQL-savvy. Etc.
You have might installed WAMP Server / XAMPP Server for mySQL Database
Click on WAMP icon and select Apache, Open "httpd.conf" and find tag starts with
<Directory "c:/wamp/www">
...
</Directory>
and update the code as below
<Directory "c:/wamp/www">
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from none
Allow from all
Allow from 127.0.0.1
Allow from ::1
Allow from localhost
</Directory>
Now Create REST APIs in your local server as you might use PHP or whatever,
and connect android app with apis with assigned IP Address to your computer in LAN.
It is not one single answer, but a group of answers. Firstly what you need is the concept of data forwarding through introspected tunnels over the network. At the end of the day, your database is always listening on certain port, that is local to your machine, meaning only you can access and modify the contents of the database. For example if you access PHPMyAdmin, you can go the MySQL address on your local machine.
What you need to do is make that access public to the internet, what you need is to broadcast your existence(internet protocol address) to the web. Thus making a public hub, in short, Local-tunnels allows you to easily share a web service on your local development machine without messing with DNS and firewall settings.
By tunneling your local machine to web , anyone with the assigned IP address can access your machine(database) over any connection,not just LAN or WI-FI. There are many options to choose from, There is ngrok,which exposes a local server behind a NAT or firewall to the internet.
Features are,
Don’t constantly redeploy your in-progress work to get feedback from clients. ngrok creates a secure public URL (https://yourapp.ngrok.io) to a local webserver on your machine. Iterate quickly with immediate feedback without interrupting flow.
Test mobile apps against a development backend running on your machine. Point ngrok at your local dev server and then configure your app to use the ngrok URL. It won't change, even when you change networks.
Building web hook integrations can be a pain: it requires a public address and a lot of set up to trigger hooks. Save yourself time and frustration with ngrok. Inspect the HTTP traffic flowing over your tunnel. Then, replay web-hook requests with one click to iterate quickly while staying in context.
Own your data. Host personal cloud services on your own private network. Run web-mail, file syncing, and more securely on your hardware with full end-to-end encryption.
Its really great, however there is a side note, because this procedure opens up your local machine and renders it IP accessible on the internet, many different security challenges arise, so it is only recommended for testing purposes with none sensitive data.
Hope this helps:)
I have searched for a solution to this but could not find one. If this is already answered, sorry, please direct me to that.
My problem is this. I have java web application running on a local intranet (Tomcat 7, Java 6, MySQL). All desktops within the intranet are connected thru LAN and access the application using the specific server IP, something like 198.162.2.10.
Now, I want to access this thru my android mobile phone as well. The entire building is Wifi enabled and I'm able to access this web application, if I know the IP and enter it in the mobile browser. But, I would like to make this mobile access automatic and wrap it in an app which on click access this automatically, even when the IP changes. We have dynamic IPs.
You can use WebView component to display a web page within your application.
As alternative you can use HttpURLConnection co perform Http request and posts to your web application.
Regarding the dynamic IP you can configure a Local dns server or assign a static IP to the server.
Anyway the application need a fixed address to connect to the web application, unless you want to insert the address manually each time.
I am in need of some help here.
I want to make an Android application that eventually syncs to a web server in order to get information (i.e. user can write a note through the website, and it automatically syncs to the phone).
I am aware that I would need some web servers and hosting, and don't know too much about that so I will look into it later.
MY question, however, is how I can simulate this over a local network?
As in, if I create a basic webpage that has a two text boxes (one for name, one for content) and a 'submit' button, if I run it via localhost WHAT methods can I use to get this information to sync to my handset?
If anyone could be kind enough to give me a laymens terms breakdown it would be seriously appreciated, I feel so lost!
You have some alternatives to achieve what you want, here is a traditional one:
Start with installing XAMPP and run a local server
Write your web pages, store the data in mysql
Write PHP code to extract the data from mysql
Use Android HttpClient to call your PHP
There are other alternatives:
Use the same method but instead of PHP write HTML5 and you have a mobile WEB application
Check out the GCM Demo Application
Check out Google App Engine
Check out Amazon Web Services
There are others
Enjoy :)
Yaron
When you use localhost (meaning you install a server package such as Apache / IIS / XAMPP / WAMP in your computer), your machine becomes a server. So, you can access the localhost from any device which is in the same network.
Say you have a computer connected to a WiFi router. If you setup the server i.e. the localhost in that computer and a laptop and a mobile phone is connected to the same WiFi router, the phone and laptop will be able to get service from the computer.
To access data stored in the MySQL server from the other devices (e.g. the phone), you have to write proper service. Else, you can write a mobile web app in the server that accesses the MySQL data and just access it from the device.