What is the difference between SOAP and RESTful Architecture and how I can use them in Android? My application is a booking engine car, I am still confused. Can someone help me to see the difference between those, and how I can Apply in an Android application with example please. Also how i can use the MVC Architecture
REST (REST describes a set of architectural principles by which data can be transmitted over a standardized interface) is almost always going to be faster. The main advantage of SOAP (SOAP defines a standard communication protocol specification for XML-based message exchange)is that it provides a mechanism for services to describe themselves to clients, and to advertise their existence.
REST is much more lightweight and can be implemented using almost any tool, leading to lower bandwidth and shorter learning curve. However, the clients have to know what to send and what to expect.
In general, When you're publishing an API to the outside world that is either complex or likely to change, SOAP will be more useful. Other than that, REST is usually the better option.
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I need to synchonize some data accross different phones. For example I want to enable "friends" to (automatically) share notes...
I'm now wondering what would be the best approch to reach this.
At the moment i think I'll have to write my own webservise to reach this goal.
As I started to think about a SOAP webservice I found lots of people saying that they would prpose a REST approach.
What would be the "better" solution in my case or are there any other approches for synchonizing data on different Android phones?
Maybe I should start by mentioning that REST is not a protocol and as such hard to compare to SOAP which is.
The main disadvantages with using SOAP for mobile applications are that it normally uses XML and thereby more data than most other protocols and that it's fairly complex both to set up and to maintain. On the other hand, if one party writes the server and one the client, SOAP gives you good ways to see to that changes are communicated clearly (ie WSDL). SOAP is generally not very well supported in mobile phones and may require third party libraries to make it work.
REST is often (mis)used as a name for HTTP based communication using JSON, which is a pretty easy way to communicate with mobile devices and has low overhead. If you have control over both server and client, it's not the wrong way to go (but not the only one either) JSON is generally very easy to get to work on all mobile platforms, and HTTP is well supported by the phones themselves.
It's better to use REST than SOAP because SOAP is very verbose and will increase the network data size.
Besides, if you use SOAP, you have to include external librairies (like kSOAP) to consume the response. With REST, a standard HTTP client is OK.
About data format: think about JSON that is less verbose than XML.
Concerning synchronization, I don't know if Android SDK provides classes to perform this work.
I'm working on an Android app that consumes a web service that has the potential to return quite a lot of data. The web service is also goingto be built by my team, and we're looking into ways of transferring data to the client with the least amount of load. We've looked into REST and SOAP, and can't decide between the two. Would JSON be a good alternative? We might need to fetch quite a lot of data in some use cases.
We'd really rather not use SOAP, if can avoid it. The emphasis is on reducing the work needed to be done on the Android system as much as possible.
Could anybody please help us out? As far as technology scope is concerned, we have full freedom of choice as long as we stay within the JAVA umbrella.
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: Not sure how to add comments, so I'll do it here(I read the FAQs, but couldn't find the necessary section)
Hi,
Let me start by apologising for my vague problem statement, I was actually a bit rushed when I posted the query. Anyway, to answer your questions, by "a lot of data", I mean that there are going to be ba few large requests(2-3, depending on the use case) that MIGHT return a lot of data, e.g. if I search using the entity name(complete or partial), the result, which is going to be textual data only, would be considerably less than if the serach was made with country as a search parameter, in which case it might return several hundred separate results. One particular search parameter has the potential to return a few thousand rows of data. What we can control is the amount of data in each row(so to speak) returned. Currently, we're attempting to reduce the items to display per row(we're attempting to keep it below 5). It's a business decision, I'm afraid, so if we're stuck with the current scenario of 12 items per row, we need to be prepared for that as well, I'm afraid.
What you just said was the equivalent of "i cannot decide between unleaded and 15" tyres".
Restful web services tend to be lighter than soap but there are use cases for both. They are both technologies used to deliver service orientated architecture. For you small description I would use rest although with more detail there may be a case for soap. You say a lot of data but does this mean many small requests or a few large ones?
Your restful web service may return a variety of data formats such as xml, yaml and json. Json's syntax makes it lighter than xml so that could be a good choice. Examples of this sort of setup include Facebook's open graph api and drupal's services module.
I want to know about how to call webservices in android I had done a lot of search from Internet and have read several tutorials but was not able to understand much and manipulate, can anyone suggest any Tutorial, or provide any Pdf file or any book related to web services so that I can understand it.
Thanks in advance
The first reading I would suggest is this one - this is the W3School tutorial. Don't forget to read the related chapters included in this tutorial - Soap, Wsdl, etc - as this tutorial taken as a standalone would not be so valuable. This tutorial is not specifically related to Android but will give you all the information needed to understand the use and constraints of this kind of architecture, and then structure your project.
Under Android, you will face the specific contraint of mobile phones and tablets: the network can be down, and is often down: in the tube, in a basement, in any area that have a bad network coverage. So you will have to take care of this, either by caching data or allowing the application to work in degraded mode when no network is available. These are just examples as I don't know your context.
After that, Android is developed in Java, with a specific API that comes on top of the regular java.* packages. These are just tools to implement the client side. On server side, depending of whether you control these services, you may also have some implementation to do. If so, this can be Java, PHP, .Net, anything: one of the purpose of the web services architecture is to stay independant of the remote implementation to only care the exchange protocol. But reading your question, I think the two first points are more important (or have an higher priority let's say) than the implementation as they are prerequisites. (EDIT: Anyway, a useful discussion about that can be found here on StackOverflow.)
Android Doesn't have it's own tool then you should use your own or use some Thing Like KSOAP2.
You Can Use This.
http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/88b6e5/how-to-call-web-service-in-android-using-soap
I have seen the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHXn3Kg2IQE and it was very interesting.But any one have implemented the REST web service using the services.I am developing the chat app,i need to call the web services in some interval if any one done it then please send me idea about it.
Thank you.
I know you've seen my question about the android restful API service, and think you can do something similar the the answers stated there. You'll need to use a Handler to execute a timed callback from the service.
Also, since that question was answered I've discovered google buffers which may be worth you looking at:
Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format.
There are some good examples on the tutorial pages - it'll make your chat client super fast!
I want to develop an Android application based on location based social network like (Google latitude) so which type of client/server will be used for my application. What type of client/server architecture will be used? Is there any helpful website, video, book about client/server architecture related to my application? (I am new in Android development.)
What framework would you like to use on server? What computer languages are you proficient in? Do you want to run this on your own servers or in the cloud?
A generic answer is:
Create a RESTful service on server. REST is pretty common and is supported under all modern languages-frameworks. As data format use JSON as it is easier and faster to decode then XML and also maps more nicely to objects. If you use Java/servlets on server you might want to take a look at Resteasy.
On Android use HTTPClient to communicate with your REST server. Use Gson to produce/consume JSON and map it to your objects.
I'd say use CRest and ignore all these red-eye nerds who say that you should reinvent your own bicycle by using HTTPClient and GSON/org.json. It's not worth it. You need a client-server communication channel, right? Just take it.