I'm currently developing an application which aims to provide users with a map with which they can navigate and which will also track their position. Another part to the application is that the user must be able to share a comment that comes to mind (similar to Tweets/Facebook status) which will be viewable to other users of the application. The idea is that these comments would be categorised depending on the nature of the comment.
However, as this is my first android application and my programming experience is quite minimal, I'm having a little bit of difficulty. I have integrated Google Maps into the application, however I'm stuck on the Comments section. I've been told I need to use a MySQL Database and use PHP as the go between with Android & the db?
I'm not really experienced using databases and so I'm unsure if I could implement some kind of category system for the comments? Ideally, the user would be presented with a list view of the categories and then select an appropriate one which would show all the comments posted to that category, much like a Twitter feed. Can this be achieved using MySQL? Am I on the right path?
Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Forgive me if I target this at the wrong level, from you question I assume you are very new to this game.
For your users to share content with each other they are going to have to talk to a middle man, a server, your server. This server is going need to be running a customer website (webservice) and record all users comments and then feed those comments back to all users running your applications on their phones.
How those comments are stored and what language this webservice runs on is upto you.
For languages you could pick any some of the most popular (in no particular order) are:
Java
C#
Perl
PHP
JavaScript
Python
etc.
With the language you choose you are going to provide an Api to your application (look into Json Over Rest).
The other thing your service is going to need to do is store this information, databases are good places to store information, again there are a lot to choose from. Starting with traditional Sql Databases:
MySql
PostgreSQL
MS-Sql-Server
DB2
Oracle
etc.
All of these are going to be well able to handle you requirements. You may also wish too look at a NoSql alternative.
So when a user adds a comment in your application your application opens an internet connection to your server and sends the comment. The server [PHP | Java | Python | etc.] checks to make sure the comment is OK and is from a registered user, then sends it to the database. The database [MySql | MS-SQL | DB2 | etc] writes this comment to a table. When your application wants to display comments from other users it will send what categories it is interested in to your server, which will ask the database for the most appropriate comments, the data base will retrieve these and pass them back to the server which will in turn pass these onto your client.
In answer to your question:
Yes MySql and PHP running on your server will be able to handle this, so will a large number of other tools.
Please do not start writing to databases until you understand about Little Bobby Tables
Related
I know this is not a type of question that should be asked on this platform, but I really need an good insight from the people who have worked in this field. I want to set up a database for my Android app. My app has no Image or Media data, it's all text for now, like user posts, likes and dislikes. I am thinking of storing all this in SQL tables. I want to perform tasks like auto deletion of entries after a certain time they have been entered. Store likes and dislikes, deletion of posts based on their dislikes, (if dislikes cross certain threshold, I want the post to be deleted.) I was thinking of using PHP and use hosting from a basic hosting provider like, hostgator or something like that. Though I am worried about the performance. For now I don't expect large no of users, only few hundred a day. But they will be interacting with the database all the time for eg, liking a post, disliking a post etc. It would be really nice if someone could guide me into right path. Thanks!!
You need to develop web services for doing that.According to me rest api is best for the task you wanna do.
check the link for demo.
http://www.androidhive.info/2014/01/how-to-create-rest-api-for-android-app-using-php-slim-and-mysql-day-12-2/
You could use the inbuilt SQLite database which is standard in android development or you store them in a backend on your server on a MySQL instance and the app can access your data over a restful webservice.
I'm a complete newbie in android development with some basic programming knowledge. Right now, I want to develop an E-Commerce app which allows the user to upload pictures for the public to browse through. However, I have no idea how should I store all the data, including the details(username and password) of the user, in the server. As far as I know, the database most often used in android is SQLite, but I'm not sure whether it's suitable to be used in my case.
Please shed some light. Any form of help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
You could set-up a backend using some database (eg. MySQL) and some programming language (eg. PHP) as well as some kind of web-server (eg. Apache).
You would store the products,user data in tables of the database. Pictures would be stored on some directory on your server and you could store references to their path in the respective fields.
Your client (android) would load the products list as well as submit new products via issuing requests to your server back end, and perhaps store them in some SQLite database if you need the old items viewed to remain viewable without an internet connection.
A few tutorials to get you started:
http://www.androidhive.info/2012/05/how-to-connect-android-with-php-mysql/
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/android/android_php_mysql.htm
If you'll create an e-commerce mobile app, it cannot exists as a mobile app alone because it needs to connect to other users. You need to integrate it to a web service or a cloud service to tasks such as getting the item data, images, and other tasks involved. There are Baas (cloud) that you can use such as Parse and Kinvey.
I'm about to build a GPS Spot Finder application with Android and I am trying to decide what requirements are feasible and what aren't. The app would enable users to essentially add different spots on a Google Map. One of the problems would be fetching the data, adding new spots, etc, etc. This, of course would mean the database would have to be online and it would have to be central. My question is, what kind technologies would I need to make this happen? I am mostly familiar with XAMPP, PHPMyAdmin and the like. Can I just use that and connect Android to the database? I assume I would not need to create a website...just the database?
What different approaches can I take with this? Be great if people can point me in the right direction.
Sorry if I don't make any sense and if this type of question is inappropriate for Stackoverflow :S
Create a website to access the database locally, and have Android send requests to the website.
If users are adding spots to a map that only they see, then it makes sense to keep the data local to Android using a built-in database (SQLite). That looks like
ANDROID -> DATABASE
You can read up about SQLite options here.
If users need to see all the spots added by all other users, or even a subset of spots added by users, then you need a web service to handle queries to the database: Connect to a remote database...online database
ANDROID -> HTTP -> APPLICATION SERVER -> DATABASE
Not only is trying to interface directly to a database less stable, but it may pose risks in terms of security and accessibility.
Never never use a database driver across an Internet connection, for any database, for any platform, for any client, anywhere. That goes double for mobile. Database drivers are designed for LAN operations and are not designed for flaky/intermittent connections or high latency.
Additionally, Android does not come with built in clients to access databases such as MySQL. So while it may seem like more work to run a web service somewhere, you will actually be way better off than trying to do things directly with a database. Here is a tutorial showing how to interface these two.
There is a hidden benefit to using html routes. You will need a programming mindset to think through what type of data is being sent in the POST and what is being retrieved in the GET. This alone will improve your application architecture and results.
Why not try using something that is already built into android like SQLite? Save the coordinates of these "spots" into a database through there. This way, everything is local, and should be speedy. Unless, one of your features is to share spots with other users? You can still send these "spots" through different methods other than having a central database.
And yes, you just need an open database, not a website, exactly. You could technically host a database from your home computer, but I do not suggest it.
If you are looking at storing the data in your users mobile nothing better than built in SQLLite.
If you are looking at centralized database to store information, Parse.com is a easy and better way to store your user application data in centralized repository.
Parse.com is not exactly a SQL based database, However you can create table , insert / update and retrieve rows from android.
Best part is it is free upto 1GB. They claim 400,000 apps are built on Parse.com. I have used few of my application typically for user management worked great for me.
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I want to sync data (such as db record, media) between an Android App and a Server. If you've seen Evernote or similar Applications, you certainly understand what I mean.
I have some question (imagine we want to sync DB records):
Every user has a part of server space for himself (such as Evernote or Dropbox). Maybe the user creates new records by cellphone and creates new records in server. How can I match these records together? If there are records with same ID What algorithms do you suggest me?
Except JSON, Are there any way for send data between cellphone device and server?
If SyncAdapter and ContentProvider can solve my problems, please explain exactly for me. (If you could offer some samples or tutorials to me OR Any advice or keywords to help broaden/guide my search would be appreciated as well).
I'll try to answer all your questions by addressing the larger question: How can I sync data between a webserver and an android app?
Syncing data between your webserver and an android app requires a couple of different components on your android device.
Persistent Storage:
This is how your phone actually stores the data it receives from the webserver. One possible method for accomplishing this is writing your own custom ContentProvider backed by a Sqlite database. A decent tutorial for a content provider can be found here: http://thinkandroid.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/writing-your-own-contentprovider/
A ContentProvider defines a consistent interface to interact with your stored data. It could also allow other applications to interact with your data if you wanted. Behind your ContentProvider could be a Sqlite database, a Cache, or any arbitrary storage mechanism.
While I would certainly recommend using a ContentProvider with a Sqlite database you could use any java based storage mechanism you wanted.
Data Interchange Format:
This is the format you use to send the data between your webserver and your android app. The two most popular formats these days are XML and JSON. When choosing your format, you should think about what sort of serialization libraries are available. I know off-hand that there's a fantastic library for json serialization called gson: https://github.com/google/gson, although I'm sure similar libraries exist for XML.
Synchronization Service
You'll want some sort of asynchronous task which can get new data from your server and refresh the mobile content to reflect the content of the server. You'll also want to notify the server whenever you make local changes to content and want to reflect those changes. Android provides the SyncAdapter pattern as a way to easily solve this pattern. You'll need to register user accounts, and then Android will perform lots of magic for you, and allow you to automatically sync. Here's a good tutorial: http://www.c99.org/2010/01/23/writing-an-android-sync-provider-part-1/
As for how you identify if the records are the same, typically you'll create items with a unique id which you store both on the android device and the server. You can use that to make sure you're referring to the same reference. Furthermore, you can store column attributes like "updated_at" to make sure that you're always getting the freshest data, or you don't accidentally write over newly written data.
If we think about today, accepted answer is too old. As we know that we have many new libraries which can help you to make this types of application.
You should learn following topics that will helps you surely:
SyncAdapter: The sync adapter component in your app encapsulates the code for the tasks that transfer data between the device and a server. Based on the scheduling and triggers you provide in your app, the sync adapter framework runs the code in the sync adapter component.
Realm: Realm is a mobile database: a replacement for SQLite & Core Data.
Retrofit Type-safe HTTP client for Android and Java by Square, Inc. Must Learn a-smart-way-to-use-retrofit
And your sync logic for database like: How to sync SQLite database on Android phone with MySQL database on server?
Best Luck to all new learner. :)
If you write this yourself these are some of the points to keep in mind
Proper authentication between the device and the Sync Server
A sync protocol between the device and the server. It will usually go in 3 phases, authentication, data exchange, status exchange (which operations worked and which failed)
Pick your payload format. I suggest SyncML based XML mixed with JSON based format to represent the actual data. So SyncML for the protocol, and JSON for the actual data being exchanged. Using JSON Array while manipulating the data is always preferred as it is easy to access data using JSON Array.
Keeping track of data changes on both client and server. You can maintain a changelog of ids that change and pick them up during a sync session. Also, clear the changelog as the objects are successfully synchronized. You can also use a boolean variable to confirm the synchronization status, i.e. last time of sync. It will be helpful for end users to identify the time when last sync is done.
Need to have a way to communicate from the server to the device to start a sync session as data changes on the server. You can use C2DM or write your own persistent tcp based communication. The tcp approach is a lot seamless
A way to replicate data changes across multiple devices
And last but not the least, a way to detect and handle conflicts
Hope this helps as a good starting point.
#Grantismo provides a great explanation on the overall. If you wish to know who people are actually doing this things i suggest you to take a look at how google did for the Google IO App of 2014 (it's always worth taking a deep look at the source code of these apps that they release. There's a lot to learn from there).
Here's a blog post about it: http://android-developers.blogspot.com.br/2014/09/conference-data-sync-gcm-google-io.html
Essentially, on the application side: GCM for signalling, Sync Adapter for data fetching and talking properly with Content Provider that will make things persistent (yeah, it isolates the DB from direct access from other parts of the app).
Also, if you wish to take a look at the 2015's code: https://github.com/google/iosched
For example, you want to sync table todoTable from MySql to Sqlite
First, create one column name version (type INT) in todoTable for both Sqlite and MySql
Second, create a table name database_version with one column name currentVersion(INT)
In MySql, when you add a new item to todoTable or update item, you must upgrade the version of this item by +1 and also upgrade the currentVersion
In Android, when you want to sync (by manual press sync button or a service run with period time):
You will send the request with the Sqlite currentVersion (currently it is 1) to server.
Then in server, you find what item in MySql have version value greater than Sqlite currentVersion(1) then response to Android (in this example the item 3 with version 2 will response to Android)
In SQLite, you will add or update new item to todoTable and upgrade the currentVersion
Look at parseplatform.org.
it's opensource project.
(As well as you can go for commercial package available at back4app.com.)
It is a very straight forward and user friendly server side database service that gives a great android client side API
one way to accomplish this to have a server side application that waits for the data. The data can be sent using HttpRequest objects in Java or you can write your own TCP/IP data transfer utility. Data can be sent using JSON format or any other format that you think is suitable. Also data can be encrypted before sending to server if it contains sensitive information. All Server application have to do is just wait for HttpRequests to come in and parse the data and store it anywhere you want.
I would suggest using a binary webservice protocol similar to Hessian. It works very well and they do have a android implementation. It might be a little heavy but depends on the application you are building. Hope this helps.
#Grantismo gives a great overview of Android sync components.
SyncManagerAndroid library provides a simple 2-way sync implementation to plug into the Android Sync framework (AbstractThreadedSyncAdapter.OnPerformSync).
https://github.com/sschendel/SyncManagerAndroid
I'm developing an Android app as a "proof of concept" for our company. If they like it and think it's worth investing, then we'll move on to bigger things. I'm trying to figure out the best/most practical approach for this.....the basics of the app will connect to our DB and display information regarding a specific customer. For now, let's say we will only pull data from 3-4 tables (but there could be 10+ in the future). If the app doesn't have an internet connection then it should use the local DB. What is the best approach for this? Here's what I was thinking and would like some input/suggestions if possible:
1.) app runs checks internet connection. If exists, check db version (how, through a web service?)..if server db is newer, get latest data. If no internet, use local db.
2.) app parses data and displays it.
If this is correct, then there could be no modifications to the web service that would add fields to a result without changing the app as well. Is there a way for an app to parse fields regardless of how many fields there are?
I've read and walked through the tutorial on google with databases and such (Notepad tutorial) but it seems like the column names are all hard-coded in the parsing class, which I was hoping to avoid.
Sorry if this is confusing but I know I need my app to use a local db to read data, I also know that the app must get data from the server when it can (via onCreate or a refresh button) and copy it locally....Copying it locally is the part I'm having trouble understanding I guess....is there no way of saying "go out and get this result and display it", knowing that those results could mean 5 fields the first time or 1 the next.
Any help/guidance is greatly appreciated!
You probably want to use a SQLLite DB to store your data locally, a ContentProvider to provide CRUD access to the db, and a SyncAdapter to sync with your server when possible. The Sync Adapter also writes to the DB via the ContentProvider. See the SampleSyncAdapter sample in the SDK for an example of how this works. You will be implementing your own ContentProvider, but the sample just uses Android's supplied Contacts ContentProvider.
http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/SampleSyncAdapter/index.html