What are the best ways to connect site and show it's data on an android application ? Also does I have to create anything on server where the site is for using JSON ? I am new to programming web android application's, though I searched a lot I didn't find anything which would explain me straight to the point.
You're on the solid ground starting out using JSON as the interchange between the two.
Alot of popular mobile apps like Twitter and Foursquare have restful APIs set up to interact with their mobile clients by exchanging HTTP requests that contain data formatted as JSON. Most of the communication between the two can be accomplished with HTTP requests using the standard GET and POST methods.
A good place to start would be setting up some server endpoints that output this data and then setting up your android app to request and parse this data just like a browser would. You just need to set the appropriate mimetypes on your server end (application/json).
Most modern server-side languages have implemented modules/functions that can take their native data structures and approximate them in serialized JSON (PHP's json_encode(), python's json.dumps() etc) These can be used to output data from within the app or database to your mobile client where it can be interpreted and used in the Java environment there.
To pass back JSON you need to set the mime type (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/477816/the-right-json-content-type), which is application/json.
If you are passing back JSON or XML then the client just needs to make the appropriate http call, most likely GET, perhaps POST, to actually retrieve the information.
You can use something like this as a starting point:
http://lukencode.com/2010/04/27/calling-web-services-in-android-using-httpclient/
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 need to retrieve huge amounts of data from a database through a web service from an Android app. I have two different ways to do this, and I wanted some advice on it:
1. The first option is to create a .php file on the server side that managed any POST coming from the client (Android app). The server would then create a JSON response. Finally we would parse this response using a JSON parser in Android. This is also known as the REST scheme.
2. The second option is to create a SERVLET, execute it from the client (Android), have the servlet send the request to the database for us, and finally parse that data from Android. Obviously the servlet would be written so that it could easily interact with the database.
Points to note (so as to decide which option is better):
1. I won't be storing anything in the database from the client. That is, my Android app is read-only.
2. I will be reading from a huge database, so it is a priority here the performance of the Client-Server interaction, with a special mention for data parsing and for servlet vs php performance.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Android has built-in support for parsing JSON data with the use of JSONObjects and JSONArrays, so it would be a lot easier to handle data in that form, rather than handling servlets. Its even possible to directly receive the web service response as a JSONObject or JSONArray.
In general, web services in Android should be of the RESTful type. That's how Google seems to prefer it. That's why there's built-in support for JSON, but not for SOA or Servlets.
References:
1. Reasons for not directly write Servlets for creating a REST API.
2. Servlet vs REST.
My client is an Android app and my service is an asp.net web api. I’m the only one using my service. I am trying to duplicate, in the Android-REST world what I am already doing in the Microsoft Windows Phone 7/ WCF SOAP world. I have numerous methods that both receive complex objects and return complex objects.
The WCF-SOAP world is simple. You can pass any complex arguments you want and return any complex results you want. Logically, it’s just a Remote Procedure Call.
But when I post questions about doing the same thing in REST, I’m told I should limit my services into GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE only. And that I should only do what is “proper” according to RFC2616. Some speak of this in almost a religious manner.
Forgeting about the religion, what’s wrong with using a GET for everything? Or what’s wrong with using a POST for everything? What I do does not fall into the simplistic RFC2616 categories. For instance I’m passing a thousand legs of a trip taken in a car and I’m getting back another version of that trip with erratic GPS errors smoothed out. Or, I’m sending a conversation in english and getting that conversation back in German.
In the android client I have the objects I want to send over HTTP already serialized into json strings by using Google-GSON. So my questions are…
How can I send these json strings to my REST Service as arguments in either GET or POST?
Is it possible and feasible to use just all GETs (or all POSTs) for all of my calls to my REST Service and how do I do that?
I have a more pragmatic question about this posted at sending a json string in a http url as I can’t find any examples anywhere of sending json strings over http GET or POST.
Thanks, Gary
Using the good HTTP verb is very usefull to simply know what to do when you request failed (for example) or just to do some specific stuff. If you sent a POST request, it's implicitly suppose that you have to parse your resource in order to obtain a stream which be sent via the request's body. In other hand, when you are retrieving data via GET, it's suppose that the request is gonna be sent back to you as a stream that you will mapped to your model, pojo, or anything else.
I can suggest you to use library such as RESTDroid. You can send POJO and receive POJO. It's a "resource oriented" library, so you can know at any moment if a particular local resource is remotely syncronized. Data persistence between local and remote is automatically handles.
RESTDroid is alpha released. You can have a look to RoboSpice. It's a powerful library to manage REST call but it's up to you to manage the persistency between local and remote resources.
1) The WCF-SOAP world is simple. You can pass any complex arguments you want and return any complex results you want. Logically, it’s just a Remote Procedure Call.
- IN REST:"You can pass any complex arguments you want and return any complex results you want too.
2a) Forgeting about the religion, what’s wrong with using a GET for everything?
In SOAP services WCF/or classical you are wrapping all requests into http POST so using single verb would end up to SOAP or - don't even think about it - your own communication protocol:-D
2b) You can technically compose GET request with non empty body - most of the servers ignore it by default though and it would be technically problematic to read it..
the other part of the question is answered by Pcriulan above
Can any one tell what exactly meant by web service in anddroid. Every where am able to find how to call webvservice using different protocols. but am not understanding what exactly a web service.
Web Services are similar to web pages in the sense that you access them over the web using HTTP. The difference is that you are typically getting raw data back instead of a presentation page. For example you might get a row of records back like addresses. So the transport layer is HTTP. The data for Android is typically going to be encoded in JSON, or XML. And you can access the service using HttpClient or URLConnection. Often you can test a web service in a browser to see what you are getting back and you will usually see JSON or XML formatted data. For JSON you use a library like simple_json to extract into java object. XML is usually processed using a SAX Parser. They are really quite easy to use.
A Web Service, in Android, is just like any other computer, a request for information over HTTP.
"Web Services can convert your application into a Web-application" (from w3schools.com) means that your can use Web Services to provide a richer and more up-to-date experience. For example if your application is a text editor it could check a web services for updates rather than force the user to check a website for updates. Another example is writing your own client to Facebook which would use several Web Service calls and depend on Facebook for content to present to the user.
A web service is a standard used for exchanging information between
applications or systems of heterogeneous type. Software applications
written in various programming languages and running on various
platforms can use web services to exchange information over Internet
using http protocol. This inter-operability can be achieved between
Java and Dot net applications, or PHP and Java applications.
For example, an android application can interact with java or .net application using web services.
i'd like to aks, if someone were to create a web site, let's say for example: a site for storing information on an online database, what would be the recommended web service (SOAP or REST) and format to use (XML or JSON) if there will be server - client transactions/interactions and a client application will also be used in an android platform?
also, i'm curious. does anyone know if google uses REST web service and JSON format for the GMAIL in android?
thanks
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I'm not sure about what they use in the GMAIL application.
But I'd prefer REST and JSON because of two simple reasons
REST is easier to access, since forming the request is not gonna take much time.
JSON lib is bundled with android and is smaller in size when compared with its XML counterpart.