I'm working on a cross platform game which will support both logins and 'guest' play. The benefit to logging in is, of course, that your game progress will be saved and accessible via multiple devices. For guest play I'll just be storing game progress locally via JSON or something similar.
What do you see as the best way of saving game progress externally? When the user logs in, their completion should be fetched and updated locally, and when the user completes an action (beats a level, etc.) their completion should be updated locally and then pushed to the external source, too.
Initially I was considering just MySQL with a Levels table or something similar, but would a JSON approach (MongosDB, maybe?) be best? What would you recommend?
Thanks!
If you don't want to spend time learning a web language and database, you can use a Backend as a Service (BaaS) provider like Parse.com
If you do want to learn a web language and database, you can take your pick of anything, really. Your problem is simple and it'll make an effective learning exercise no matter what you choose.
CoreData. For both local and external use.
It has more than you asked for, but may be challenging to get into.
From what I see, also SQLite should do the job. I could say that is lighter than Core Data.
SQLite is a software library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. SQLite is the most widely deployed SQL database engine in the world. The source code for SQLite is in the public domain.
SQLite
Related
I have a website which display quotes grouped by author.
The front end is in asp.net and the database is in sql server 2012.
The table is simple with four fields.
Id numeric and primary key
Author nvarchar
Quote nvarchar
Insertdate datetime.
Now, I want to create a mobile app on both Android and ios platform.
First I started with Android using android studio.
I have the basic design ready with layout.
Now, I am stuck with the main requirements which is I want to give user the options of downloading the quotes when online and the quotes already downloaded should be available offline.
I have been trying multiple tutorial but can't find the one with the exact requirements.
So, is this the below right way of going forward?
I created a webservice and transferring the data using retrofit library. Now I'm able to display the data but not storing it locally. As this part is complete just want to be sure if I have done it the correct way as don't want to rollback once I start working on the part two that is storing the data in sqlite.
Also, can I reuse some of the functionality on ios.
Seems reasonable.
What you probably want to do now is introduce local storage for the data so they don't have to be online and accessing the API all the time. For Android SQLite is the normal way of storing data, and iOS uses Core Data (although SQLite is available).
Everything up to the API is reusable, you'll need to develop the download and storage for each ecosystem separately.
NB - that being said, I believe that Google's Firebase cloud database has an offline mode, so you could potentially work around the need to develop the syncs separately and use Firebase's SDK to get the data into an auto synced local store. Haven't used it myself, but it;s out there.
I need to sync my MySQL database to android phone. I am new to this. So I am referring this tutorial from Programmer Guru.
The Problem is in this tutorial they have used 3 classes, DBController, SampleBC.java, MyService.java. I have almost 10 tables to sync. So how can I change this to a better one?
Is there a way to sync the whole database?
I couldn't see correct tutorial for this.
This really depends on what your app does, and how it uses the remote data.
I have written apps which have an 'update' feature - which basically serialises the whole mysql database as json, and then decodes it in to the sqlite database on the device.
Other apps will just fetch a smaller amount of data as and when they need it.
There is no better way per se. Just different options for different situations. You need to look at how frequently your mysql data will change, and what will the experience be for your app users. Nobody likes slow apps which spend 50% of their time displaying a progress dialog while they download data.
I am new to Android Application Development and a new member at stackoverflow. I am currently trying to design a recipe application. I have decided upon the features of the app and the scope it will cover. The scope is very vast for me in terms of covering all the recipes from all over the world. I am to deal with a lot of data in this process.
I am currently trying to figure a good and efficient way of handling the data in my app. So far, as per what I have read in different forums, I believe that I have two options in terms of a database choice : 1) SQLite 2) Database on remote server (MySql/Postgre)
Following are some of the thoughts that have been going on in my mind when it comes to taking a decision between the two :
1) SQLite : This could be a good option but would be slow as it would need to access the file system. I could eliminate the slowness by performing DB data fetch tasks in the AsyncTask. But then there could be a limitation of the storage on different phones. Also I believe using SQLite would be easier as compared to using a remote DB.
2) Remote Database : The issue that I can see here is the slowness with multiple DB requests coming at the same time. Can I use threads here in some way to queue multiple requests and handle them one by one ? Is there an efficient way to do this.
Also I have one more question in terms of the formatting of my data once I pull it out from the above DB's. Is there a way I could preserve the formatting of my data ?
I would be more than thankful if someone could share their knowledgeable and expert comments on the above scenario. Also this is not a homework for me and I am not looking for any ready made code solutions. I am just looking for hints/suggestions that would help me clear my thoughts and help me take a decision. I have been looking for this for sometime now but was not able to find concrete information. I hope I will get some good advice here from the experienced people who might have encountered similar situation.
Thanks for reading this long post.
What about combining both approaches?
A local SQLite database that has the least recently used receipes so you don't need network all the time. Network is way slower than accessing the filesystem.
Some remote database accessed via some HTTP interface where you can read / write the whole database. And if you want users to be able to add receipes for other users to see you'll need an external database anyways.
SQLite : This could be a good option but would be slow as it would need to access the file system.
Accessing a local database is pretty fast, 5ms or so if it's just a simple read only query on a small database.
But then there could be a limitation of the storage on different phones
Depends on your definition of huge database. It is okay if it is only 2MB which would be enough to store lots of text-only receipes.
Also I believe using SQLite would be easier as compared to using a remote DB.
Yes, Android has a nice built-in SQLite API but no remote database API. And you don't need to setup a database server & interface.
The issue that I can see here is the slowness with multiple DB requests coming at the same time.
A decent database server can handle thousands of requests. Depends on your server hardware & software. https://dba.stackexchange.com/ should have more info on that. Required performance depends on how much users you have / expect.
I'd suggest a simple REST interface to your database since it's pretty lightweight but does not expose your database directly to the web. There are tons of tutorials and books about creating such interfaces to databases. There are even hosted database services like nextDb that do most of the work for you.
Is there a way I could preserve the formatting of my data ?
You could store HTML formatted data in your database and display it in a WebView or a TextView (via Html#fromHtml()) - both can display formatted text.
Databases don't care what type of text you store, for transfer over the internets you may need to encode the text so it does not interfere with the transport formatting (XML, JSON, ...).
A simple way is to integrate Parse into your app. They have a nice framework that easily integrates into iOS and Android. Their plan is freemium, so you'll be able to use up to 1 million API request for no charge, and then its 7 cents for every request after that.
You'll have 1gb to store all your data sets / images, etc.
I don't use parse for everything, but I HIGHLY recommended it for large data schemes because they do all the scaling for you. Check out the API, I think it would be worth your time.
I just started to work on a few of my own projects, and I'm using Parse again. I have to say it's improved a lot over the last 6-8 months. Especially with the Twitter and Facebook integration.
The key issue here is the size of the data - any significant database of recipes would be too large to store on the phone imho,thus you seem stuck with the remote database solution.
As opposed to trying access the remote database from android I suggest you use a a go between web application that will process requests from the application and return JSON objects that you need.
It totally depends on your software requirements. If you need to deal with a small amount of data then you may choose SQLite, but for a huge amount to data better use a remote DB.
SQLite: It works fine with little amount of data & I experienced it response time is good.
Remote DB: I think you may use small server side app to submit the data to your client app. It will solve/reduce your thread related issues/complexities.
I have an app that stores a sqlite database in the usual place. ie: data/data/com.blah.blah/databases. I wish to remotely locate the SQLITE database and read from and write to it. I wonder if there is a way to do it without using the Oracle Mysql option. Is there a way to just change the default location to a folder on a website. Thanks in advance. If so how do I do it. I cant find any tuts or books that explain how its done.
SQLite isn't a remote database implementation. That is kind-of part-of white it is called SQ*Lite*. :) It is for doing SQL databases based on local files, without taking the big additional overhead of having some remoteable service protocol sitting between you and the database.
There are all kinds of options for interacting with remote data stores, not just MySQL - PostgreSQL, etc. You can use whatever of those you want. You can then have on the device just the client code you need to communicate with the remote data store. It doesn't make sense for Android to supply any complicated/sophisticated here built-in, though, since exactly what you want is going to depend mostly on what you are using on your back-end server.
I'm in the process of developing an Android application that will need to connect to a central database. Users should be able to access records and add records to the database through the application. The data itself will be fairly simple with each record being made up of a number of text fields.
The database will be developed specifically for the application and only needs to be accessed through the application. Initial reading seems to indicate that a web service should be written to parse data into xml format, for use by the app.
Seen as the database is being developed from scratch, specifically for this purpose, I would like to make sure I am heading in the right direction. I have very little experience with databases and would really just like a pointer on where to start reading. Any suggestions on the format the database should take would be greatly recieved too.
Thank you
You seem to have the idea down, if it were me, I would recomend using JSON instead of XML for the Webservice, they work in very similar ways, but JSON is a lot smaller and will make the application noticeably (as in it will make a diference for the user) faster. This is specially true if you are sending large amounts of data.
Take a look at this:
GSon
If your familiar with other aspects of Java, you could make the implementation entirely server side by means of JSPs. You could access the database via the phone's browser or any other browser. If you implemented a DAO factory on the server, this would enable you to switch databases from say Oracle, to MySQL etc by means of a properties file.