It's required from me to make an android app that must
1\Displays the cheapest prizes for some goods eg car by parsing them from some commercial web sites ascending .
2\Alerts users with the updates in those web sites
I saw some android apps doing like this tasks (they enable users to be the first to know by sending them push notifications of breaking news events and so on)
for example Pulse app.
How they do this ? that is my problem
Perhaps you will advice me using rss feed but not all web sites have rss feed
for just an example this website
please can anyone help
If it were me, I'd probably use python's BeautifulSoup to scour the websites for the data you need, and then I'd store that on my webserver in some easily Java-digestible form like JSON. (BeautifulSoup is a quite powerful screen scraper and there are a lot of examples on web as to how to use it.) Auto update it every 24 hours, or more frequently, depending on your requirements. Your Android app can then regularly query this data, and then generate the required notifications, etc. Alternatively, you can use the Android compatible library here that's supposedly similar to BeautifulSoup.
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I'm creating a fantasy football mobile application on Android. One of the apps activities should be a page that has the most up to date fantasy football relevant news stories or NFL news in general. I've looked into things like RSS Readers but I'm not sure that's what I want. I basically want to display what you would see if you went to Google and typed "Fantasy Football" in the news section of the search. I really am just looking for answers on where to start on how to do something like this?
Well, You can implement it somehow in your app but It's not recommended way. For this, you have to develop an app and a back-end server as well. Your app just calls a web service from the server and shows the data to use and user. Your back-end is responsible for providing the data. Now if you updated the back-end to let's say support more information sources the data in the app is updated automatically without users have to install a new version.
For getting data on the server, You can use public webservices, RSS and also a tool like jsoup to download and parse other people website easily.
I am taking a drive into GTFS (and only a couple months into learning Android coding). I signed up as a Developer for my transit system and received a key for their GTFS data download.
However, they require that you download the GTFS data to your own servers rather than pointing your Android App directly to their servers to get the feed. Basically, I need to accomplish the below.
Their Servers ---Data---> My Server ---Data---> My App
My app will have all the tools to read/manipulate the data so the My Server part should do nothing to change the data.
I've looked into services like Amazon Web Services which has a free tier but not sure if that is what I need. Also, if it is what I need, then unsure of how to tell it to get/store the data from the transit system's servers.
Appreciate any help!
One of the easiest ways to get started, if you want to host your own server, is to use node-gtfs. However it is not the only way.
The shortest learning curve would be to use one of the two services that host transit data and provide APIs that you can use to build your own app:
Transitland
TransitFeeds.com
There are also a number of other libraries/tools/servers in other programming languages (depending on what you are comfortable with and what your goals are). OneBusAway is probably the most robust but unlikely to run on the AWS free tier. A good list of the others can be found here.
There are various websites (say LinkedIn) which have a corresponding mobile app.My question is - "How they feed data to their mobile apps?". Obviously they are not doing HTML scraping of their webpages, otherwise it would be really inefficient.
I am asking this because I have a website, and I am also going to develop an android app for that.So, do I have to design my website (like database) in a specific way to support mobile apps. (I mean, what are the preconditions do I take care of , while designing my website, in relation to the mobile apps)
What you need is a web service. It sounds little complicated but actually its not! in normal websites when you visit a website you get HTML data. but in web service when you request for a data you get the data in xml or json. Then on client side you parse this data and show it as you like.
The most used method for sending data between web services and clients is called RESTful web service and it usually uses json. So after a request you get a .json file. I highly recommend you to use RESTful web service especially since you are a beginner.
As i said RESTful web services are famous so most frameworks support that! So if you are creating you website with this frameworks you don't have to code anything! they build the web service for you. If not there are plenty of code for any given language.
Another thing is since xml (and json) file are platform independent you only need one web service to handle all of the client (android, ios, windows, etc.). And there are sufficient tools and libraries in each platform to work with xml (json) files. Sending data to server is also the same, you send the data in xml format, service receive it and do what ever need to be done (for example stores the data in database)
Lastly the world of web services are a lot bigger. What i said was a highly simplified version to give you a whole idea! If you interested to learn more there are plenty of books you can read. Many people (including myself) think web services are the future of internet. Where different services each developed by different company work together to provide user with something great.
I have been developing a web application in PHP that provides contact and calendar management. This application needs to sync its contact and calendar data with mobile devices (specifically Android, Apple, and Windows phones).
I have no experience in mobile development, so I am mostly looking for guidance. It is difficult to know what to even search for because of this lack of experience. I am mostly looking to know what is possible and what is not.
The overall goal is to be able to edit contact/calendar data from anywhere, whether that be from the web application itself or a mobile device. These changes will then be reflected no matter what tool you are using to view it. A very loose comparison is an IMAP server. One central data source where any app can hop in and view/manage e-mails.
My web application can currently handle HTTP requests using XML data. So it can send out data and have data POSTed into it.
This is where my knowledge ends. I have little insight as to what would be required of the device itself to be able to sync. If a user adds contacts to a mobile device's default contact/calendar application, how can it be told to sync with my web application? Does this mean developing an app for each mobile device in order to act as a medium between my application and the mobile device's default contact/calendar data?
Is it possible to access the internal contact/calendar data of a mobile device? Can that data be pushed to an external server or be modified by that same server? What is required on the web application's side? The mobile device's side?
These are the sort of questions I am looking to be answered. There might be questions that I haven't even thought of that I would also love to be discussed. If my question is too general, please specify anything to be clarified.
In case of iphone you have to write your own app. I would recommend to use a database (sql) on your server, then every time the application opens you can check if there are new entries on the server and load them if needed.
I think it will take you some time to get the basic knowledge about ios programming but it isn't a hard job at all.
Things you should check:
requests
uitableview(/delegate)
Event kit
There are good tutorials to learn this stuff.
One good site:
http://www.raywenderlich.com/
Is there a way to build and Android and iPhone application that automatically updates its content.
For Example: the user has download the application and we have all of our data on there and what not but then we get another entertainer that is coming to the festival and we want to list them in the app. Do I have to "Publish" an update for the users to download of can all that information be dynamic and automatically retrieved from a server every time the person has internet.
Does that makes sense to anyone, I hope it does.
The short answer is yes.
How you achieve it is to broad a topic without some more information about your specific situation. In general what you'll be looking to do is host your content online somewhere and have your application pull the most recent version when it begins.
There are many possible ways you could store your data online XML, JSON, RSS are a few that are pretty common. Which you'd want to use depends on exactly what the data you are sharing is.