I'm new to Android and to web services in general.
This is what i gotta do: My company has a back end website(for the client to monitor the sales) that's used to manage/monitor sales on some stores and it connects to a MySQL db to store data about sales and users(usernames and passwords).
What I want to do is to get data from that database and to add (sync operations) new rows, all of this from my android app.
I googled this many times and it came up with some similar projects but using another languages.
I would like to see some code samples if possible and some how-to theory, what theory should I follow when developing this, how and what ways of communicating between android and python web services and from the web services to the MySQL database.
Thank you in advance.
You will need a working API, that allows you to communicate to the web service from the android application. I would read into how to write an API and how to build a RESTful service using JSON as a way of communicating between server and android app. There are alternatives to JSON, but JSON is better suited for Android than perhaps AJAX and soap is being used less and less. (Can ajax call be done in Android? It can but has limitations)
(I could only post two full hyper links as i don't have enough reputation yet to do so, you may have to remove the spaces)
API:
http://sharismlab.com/blog/2012/07/21/how-to-write-an-api-for-your-web-app/
REST:
www .restapitutorial. com/lessons/whatisrest.html/
JSON:
htt p:// www.r evillweb.co m/article s/why-use-j son/
You may want to check out restjee. It allows you to define and implement RESTful data access APIs without having to write any server side code. Works with just about any database.
Related
I'm new to android, I'm trying to build an android app that is a front for a web portal. For example, Airbnb. They have a website, but they also have an android app that, using it's own layout, will show listings from their website.
There are many websites that teach how to or even directly convert your website to android apps. However, this will result in an app that loads too slowly and is unresponsive due to CPU usage.
Could anyone share any tutorial/guide to learn how to do this myself?
Million thanks.
To actually load data from a web server you're gonna need and API which usually delivers the proper date using JSON or XML format so that you can properly parse and display that data. Building this API is in it self a complete course on its own.
But connecting to and requesting data from the API is usually done using some networking libraries. These are some of the better know libraries for this purpose.
OkHttp: A complete library with a set of tools for handling network connections and HTTP requests.
RetroFit:Type-safe HTTP client for Android and Java by Square, Inc. which is built on top of OkHttp.
Async-Http-Client:
The Async Http Client library's purpose is to allow Java applications
to easily execute HTTP requests and asynchronously process the HTTP
responses. The library also supports the WebSocket Protocol. The Async
HTTP Client library is simple to use.
There tons of other good libraries.
its called webservices
Through android you get data in form of json from a web server and then return in custom view as you want.
Follow this link hope it will help
Step by Step Method to Access Webservice from Android
you would have to write an API/Web service or use if already exits to fetch data from web server. Basically the concept is that, the website itself must be pulling data from some database, so write an API which would fetch the data from same API and return JSON data and consume the API from your android app.
If you know PHP refere to this for the help :http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/267023/Send-and-receive-json-between-android-and-php
You can write WebService, in programming it generally refers to a web page(ex. Airbnb), that can be called from your android application which can pass in data to it, or receive data from it.
WebService is basically like a 'method' or 'function' in a normal programming language; except you're calling it over the internet.
The first thing is you have to create a Web Service. The Web Service will be your "bridge" to consume the data from other Website like airbnb or others and return the data to your android through json format for example.
You can create a Web Service using many languages like C#, Java, PHP, etc. I would like to recommend you to use the language that you know the most.
You can try to google this
Cheers
I want to install MySQL on my Server and create a database and access my database through my Android Code. I know that this work can be done through webservice in Android, is there any way that I can use it without webservice. I don't find anything related to this. Please provide any links useful for this kind of work.
Yes you can write one restful web-service which will interact with your MySql database, and then you can integrate the service with your android code.
To connect your java code to MySql, you can simply use JDBC or hibernate.
To integrate and consume the restful web service, you can use spring-android-rest-template(to call web service) and jackson-databind(to get responce in JSON format)jars. You should read once this link. I have also used the same for my android app, and It is working.
Its really easy to learn and use.
It will take hardly 30 min. to understand it.
https://spring.io/guides/gs/consuming-rest-android/
I have an Android application. This app currently connects with a mysql database using various .php files. I think that when many users access my app at the same time, it will impact the performance of the app, soi want to get rid of all .php files and create a webservice to make the connection between my app and my mysql database. Is there any tutorial i can follow that can help me create this webservice? It can be REST or any other, i just want my android app to connect with it and i want it to connect with my database. I will need GET/POST/DELETE operations.
The approach I would recommend is similar to this. Basically, you code your REST webservice methods in a separate Java application which would connect to your database. Your android application would consume the webservice, just like in the tutorial.
The tutorial uses a third party library, which I don't think is necessary, as you can use Android's AsyncTask and do the same thing. Also, keep in mind that HttpClient is deprecated and was replaced with HttpURLConnection.
I've been reading some info about Web Services for Android using SOAP or REST but I've never created a web service so I have many questions about this.
I'm developing an Android App where the users answer some questions and for each user an XML file is generated and saved in the device.
Here are my queries:
What I would like to do is to send these XML files from the devices to the Web Service and also sometimes to retrieve all the files to any
device.
Do I need to convert these files into Byte or just send the XML?
Are these actions possible with the Web Service or will you use Java Sockets? In case you prefer the Web Service, what would you use:
REST, SOAP.
I would appreciate some links to tutorials and piece of advise.
Use SQL Server to manage the data on your desktop and create a web-service in .NET on Visual Studio.
Then connect to the web-service in your application and set/get data from the DB, using web-services. You can use either XML or JSON to transfer your data between the phone and the server.
There is no need for the use of Java Socket API for this.
Links which might be useful :
How to make a web-service in .NET (does not include the implementation in Android) : http://srikanthtechnologies.com/blog/dotnet/wsdaljava.aspx
How to connect your service with Android :
http://seesharpgears.blogspot.in/2010/11/basic-ksoap-android-tutorial.html
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/304302/Calling-Asp-Net-Webservice-ASMX-From-an-Android-Ap
http://adrianandroid.blogspot.in/2012/05/access-c-net-web-service-in.html
Note: I have never worked on RESTful services. My work has always been on SOAP and hence it remains my preference.
Your final choice of how, exactly, to architect your app, is going to be based on all sorts of things that you haven't included in your questions: your experience, the experience of the other developers in the project, so on and so on.
I will say this, however. REST is deep in the heart of Android. If you decide to go with REST and, possibly, JSON instead of XML (there is, almost certainly, no reason to use byte arrays), you will find that Android's architecture supports you. SOAP and such and you are on your own.
I'm planning on writing an android app that can view and update data on a local network Oracle DB.
I have already written a python script which checks the oracle db every couple of minutes and writes out XML files which I then plan to parse through my android app to display the data.
As I mentioned though this will only work if the android device is part of the same network (either connected locally or through a vpn), and the XML will be stored on a Unix server.
The question is how to access that Unix server with the android app? Can I use FTP via an android app, or should I be looking to change the python script to send the XML to an easily retrievable location?
EDIT To clarify what you mean, you have a web service running on something like tomcat, the client sends a request to get the data from the oracle db (can also use some form of authentication), the web service responds and sends the data in a format (XML, JSON etc.), the client then sends a request back to the web service to change some data on the oracle db, and in turn it does the clients bidding?
Normally you would create a web service to provide data to mobile clients. There are several reasons for this:
Web services are accessed via HTTP/HTTPS which is a standard protocol and is guaranteed to work on all networks. Corporate wifi networks are especially notorious for locking down protocols except for web and email.
Web services compared to static XML files have an advantage of creating response on the fly. Which means that data will be current.
Web services can take some input parameters and create response based on this parameters.
Authentication: it is a common approach to implement username/passord authentication in the web service, especially if you serve some private data.
Update:
REST is a very popular type of web service. Look at some implementations in Python: Recommendations of Python REST (web services) framework?
This book helped me a lot: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260
REST is a way of designing your web service. Folks much more intelligent than you and me have divined that all of the work needed for something to work on the net can be handled through a combination of HTTP status codes, HTTP verbs like POST, GET, DELETE, PUT etc. and a clear hierarchy of resources (nouns). It sounds very limiting but it's quite beautiful when it all works together.
Have a look at the Facebook Open Graph API (developers.facebook.com) to get an idea of what a proper REST service looks like.