I am new to android. I am confused about google cloud platform.My focus is on using android app for RESTful service.
Why do I need google cloud platform when I can use native android library to access RESTful web service like this.( I mean using JSON parsing with HTTPClient/Volley etc)
As far as I have understood that to implement google cloud service, I need an android client, a backend and others....( I m not sure). Why do I need this EXTRA stuff/coding when, as I said before, I can get RESTFul response with conventional way with sdk library.The implementation of Mobile Solutions on Google Cloud Platform is difficult and strenuous task.
What are the cases, when I HAVE to use google cloud platform, cant I do it other easy way?
As per zapl's comment, there really is no reason why you need to use Google Cloud Platform with Android. Nowhere in any of Google's docs does it mention that GCP is a requirement for an Android app. Cloud Platform is a service Google offers if you want to develop your own web applications or backends for mobile applications, but you are by no means locked into using this service.
Related
I am building my mobile apps (Android and iOS). I am not sure if I understand this correctly, but it seems Cloud Endpoints allow you to develop and deploy your own APIs, while App Engine assists you in building a server application? It seems App Engine also allows you to build a web application backend that exposes REST service APIs? So it can do whatever Cloud Endpoints can do? If I use Cloud Endpoints, can my APIs interact with some kind of DB? Is there anything I can do in App Engine but cannot do in Cloud Endpoints in the context of building a REST backend for mobile apps?
I understand this question is messy.. but Google does seems to have confusing documentations there. Thanks!
App Engine is just a compute platform on which Cloud Endpoints enabled apps can run. Cloud Endpoints provides frameworks which make writing a RESTful API easier (Java, Python), while also providing features to help you manage your APIs and access them from generated client libraries. You can use Cloud Endpoints in conjunction with a database of your choosing. The Cloud Endpoints frameworks previously linked essentially make it easy to map HTTP paths to methods, which do whatever you want.
Cloud Endpoints is basically just a framework to make REST APIs on GAE. This is the part you are looking for, "...developers can use services and features available in App Engine standard environment, such as Datastore, Google Cloud Storage, Mail, Url Fetch, Task Queues, and so forth."
So to answer your question, just use Cloud Endpoints if you making an API for your Android app, it's much easier.
I m new to GCM do u guys please guide me for using Google App Engine.
I want to create a signup page which registers details of users on Google server
to signup and logging the account
Is it possible to do so?
Thanks
Google App Engine is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that lets you build and run applications on Google’s infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs change. With App Engine, there are no servers for you to maintain. You simply upload your application and it’s ready to go.
For using App Engine you have to first download an appropriate sdk based on your development environment
Download the Google App Engine SDK
For working on a particular language
Google App Engine Languages
Your question mentions a bunch of technologies and sounds a little confused, so I'll try to summarize these different technologies. Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) makes it possible for your Android app to register itself and for your server to broadcast messages to all registered devices. Google App Engine allows you to create a web server that serves as a backend for your Android app (or as a frontend web app) hosted on Google's cloud infrastructure. Google App Engine includes a feature called Cloud Endpoints which simplifies writing a backend for Android by automating serialization/deserialization, authentication, and auto-generating an Android client library for invoking the backend functionality. Google+ sign in allows you to provide users of your application with the ability to sign into your application with their Google+ account. Google+ sign in on the web also makes it possible to provide an opportunity to install your Android app and to persist the sign-in on the installed app.
I would like to provide syncing to cloud feature to an Android app.
I had read the tutorial at http://developer.android.com/training/cloudsync/index.html & http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/06/adding-backend-to-your-app-in-android.html
The examples being shown is using Google App Engine as backend storage.
I was wondering, is it possible not to tie to Google App Engine platform? For instance, using Amazon EC2?
Yes it is possible but you have to do more work on hosting a web service in EC2. Then your Android app will connect to it like this Android example. To write data instead of reading, use HTTP POST or PUT instead of GET. You would also have to implement your own user authentication.
Sure you can. Here's the Amazon AWS SDK for Android:
http://aws.amazon.com/sdkforandroid/
Yes, you will lose a little of the ease and integration of GAE, but you will gain something in flexibility. The GAE features (e.g. user authentication) tie you into Google's Android, making it harder to support Amazon or BB Android. And GAE limits you to their transactional HTTP model of communication.
What I'm trying to do is have an Android app that connects to a Google App Engine backend in order to get data from a database stored in the cloud. I've looked up some documentation and figured that Google Cloud Messaging is the best way for this. I'm stuck on trying to integrate Google App Engine with the Android app.
GCM is great for sending small messages from GAE to the app, and particularly for waking the app and getting a message to it even if it isn't running.
Sending a request from Android to GAE via GCM is new and is not the normal way of making requests. In my personal experience with new Google stuff, I would suggest you stay far away and stick to the normal way which is to do an HTTP/REST/JSON request from an Android to a servlet on GAE.
There many Android libraries for doing this including Volley from Google (this was in use long before it was release so is not as scary as the GCM thing I was mentioning). On the server you could do it with Google Endpoints for easier authentication and cross-platform support, but it too is quite wonky (it is not fully released), so if you don't need those two features I would avoid it.
I'm really new to mobile world, so I'd like to get some opinion from experienced people.
After several days searching over the internet, I'm wondering if it's possible
integrate Appcelerator Cloud Services to a custom website made with ASP.NET, for example.
Although my mobile application, built with Titanium, it's linked to ACS, and works fine, I don't know if
it's possible to manage data stored in ACS from a custom website. To clarify, in one point there is my mobile application
talks to a webserver (ACS, for example) and other point there is a website, to manage the data stored in ACS.
What do you think, someone achieved this?
Or is it preferable to write a webserver from the scratch, store my data in somewhere, and forget about ACS?
Thank you.
Appcelerator says
Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS) is a Mobile Backend as a Service
(MBaaS), offering a fast and easy way to build connected mobile apps.
Choose from a library of services such as push notification, status
updates, photo storage, and social integration, or create your own
custom cloud services.
Here in this page - Getting Started: Using the Javascript SDK - you can see how we can use javascript SDK which lets you access the Appcelerator Cloud Services server through some simple to use JavaScript calls. You can use this to develop web-based app.
ACS has a REST API which you can access through anything that supports xhr (which .NET does). For instance, to create a new user in ACS, you use the following link:
https://api.cloud.appcelerator.com/v1/users/create.json?key=YOUR APP APP KEY?email=john.smith#company.com&role=teacher
There are other properties you can tag onto the querystring to create a new user from a REST call. They have a complete API using REST. It's all documented. You can even send push notifications to devices from your custom website using the REST API! It's pretty cool.
http://cloud.appcelerator.com/docs/api/v1/users/create#rest
Good luck!