I'm current using Restlet to interface with an Android app.
I want the Restlet on the server to then trigger a C2DM push message when it gets a certain POST from an Android app - it's basically just a simple HTTP POST to Google's servers with some extra values in it.
I imagine there must be some way of using the in built connector, or otherwise, anyone have any ideas? Can't seem to find anything about it on the net, an unusual request perhaps.
Edit: Probably should have expanded on this to begin with, the reason why I ask is that I'm trying to use Apache httpClient inside the restlet but I'm not able to to get it to work. If that is what you're supposed to do, then it's probably a different question altogether.
Use Java's native HttpURLConnection object: http://download.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/net/HttpURLConnection.html
Follow the implementation guidelines provided by Google: http://code.google.com/android/c2dm/#push
So what I was doing is the right way to do it after all, I've got Apache HttpClient set up and working in a seperate thread to do the push. For some reason it fails due to a peer exception (which is the exception I was getting initially), but I've got around that by automatically trusting the SSL certificate. Why that was happening with the C2DM address I really have no idea.
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I'm developing an android app where I would like to fetch some data (mostly text) from the internet but not necesseraly from a website! I would like to have a server that allows clients to fetch some text data. What kind of server fits my goals the best? Http or maybe simply tcp? I don't know much about http so I don't know if it matches my goals and/or if it handles well a kind of text "database".
Edit:
A use case could be: people could write comments and send them to the server. Then clients could refresh their app by fetching new comments from the server. Therefore I'M asking what kind of server could best handle services and kind offre database if needed.
I like using NodeJS in combination with ExpressJS for such purposes. This combination allows you to easily work with HTTP/HTTTPS which is allowed by practically every firewall or proxy server. As of the latter reason I recommend you to use HTTP instead of an own protocol. Furhtermore, Java offers the HTTPURLConnection client which is very easy to use. Moreover, securing traffic with TLS (SSL) is very simple. In addition, NodeJS is resource efficient, runs on Windows, Linux and even on OS X.
For getting the text you can use HTTP GET request handled by the get() method of the Express instance.
This compact tutorial helped me to get familiar with Express on NodeJS.
Without knowing what your use-case is it's difficult to make a good recommendation.
With that said you may find something like https://parse.com/ suitable.
They provide an Android sdk and the 'getting started' tutorials will have you up and running in no time at all.
I am new to socket programming i have to use socket.io and node.js to connect with my server host in android so can anyone please just describe me the programming example of how to connect to server in android. And if possible please give some help regarding node.js and socket.io. As i have searched everywhere on google but not able to find out the proper example.
Thanks
You can just have your web service be REST base.
Your Android application can just talk to your web server via REST and receive data json or xml whatever you fancy.
So with node.js you should set up routes.
An example would of a route would be
www.example.com/users via GET post would return a list of users either in JSON/XML
For your android application you need a library, I believe there's a built in one already, to make request for certain routes such as www.example.com/users via GET method and write the logic to expect JSON or XML and parse that.
I just googled this:
Android: https://github.com/koush/ion
As for node.js you just have to build route...
I think is would be better:
websocket api to replace rest api?
It actually invalidate my answers sorry, REST and websocket api are different.
I have no clue what problem exactly you have. But you should break your problems down to small part. And google and search for answer for each smaller part which would make your life easier to google.
Get your webservice up first so that your android software can consume stuff, build a prototype and then build a prototype of android app that consume data from that webservice.
This is not really a problem, more like a general X vs. Y question.
So I'm experimenting with c2dm on android using a server written in google app engine. At the moment I'm using the "App Engine Connected Android Project" as a template with some added code myself. So the generated code use RequestFactory for a bunch of stuff, like registering/unregistering devices, sending messages, etc.
My previous experiences with backend communication has existed of setting up a connection to a servlet, writing to it (json) and reading the response (json).
So here's the question:
What are the benefits (if any) with using the RequestFactory for communication with the app engine instead of just writing/reading from an URLConnection's input/outputstreams?
Or is it really just a matter of taste?
One disadvantage of request factory is that it is very slow in retrieving objects.. A custom servlet and http request are MUCH faster(10x-20x faster!).
Check out this post for more details RequestFactory slow on Android
I haven't used it myself yet, but the main benefit, as I understand it, is that it makes it really easy to authenticate against the App Engine app with your Android credentials. Doing that by hand is a bit of a pain.
I'm writing an Android app which sometimes needs to request data through HTTP from a REST API. I'm using the Apache DefaultHttpClient for performing requests. Is there a way to write tests for this app and "replace" DefaultHttpClient's response when running the tests so that test results are always consistent?
As an example of the things I'd like to test, one of the web services I'm accessing takes a string and performs a text search, returning a paged list of objects. I need to test the cases where the list is empty, the list fits in the first page, or the list is larger than a page and the app needs to make several requests to get the complete list.
I'm not the developer of this web API nor can modify its responses, so I can't change what it returns. For the above example, if I want to test the case where the list returned is empty, I could just search for a string which I'm sure won't return any results, but the other two cases are harder because what the service can return is always changing.
I think ideally I would have a way to get a modified DefaultHttpClient when running tests, that returns a hardcoded result for requests to a given URL instead of actually doing the network request. This way I would always get consistent results independently of the real web service's response.
I'm currently using Robotium for testing but I'm open to using other tools too.
Yes, you can definitely "fake" responses when using the HttpClient framework. It's quite convoluted, and I will have to leave most of the details up to you, but I will give you a quick overview:
Implement ClientHttpRequestFactory, mainly so you can override the createRequest() method so you can...
Return your custom implementation of ClientHttpRequest, in which you can override the execute() method so you can ...
Return your custom implementation of ClientHttpResponse in which you will finally be able to return your fake response data, e.g. getBody() can return the content of a file, you can hardcode the headers in getHeaders(), etc.
The rest is figuring out how to best tie all these shenanigans to your service layer.
You might give Charles a try for something like this. Sorta a non-code solution.
http://www.charlesproxy.com/
I use the Charles' reverse proxies and the map local tool for things like this.
What you do is point your request at your local box on the reverse proxy port. Charles in turn can be configured to provide a static hard-coded flat file but to your app it looks like a 100% genuine web service response.
There are lots of other cool things you can do with Charles - watch traffic from your android app to and from your server and breakpoints (which allows you to tweak requests and responses before they are sent and received). Definitely worth checking out.
Another option is to use Dependency Injection so that you can change the HttpClient when running the tests. Check out Guice if you are interested.
I'm guessing you are interested in writing functional tests using the standard Android Junit testing framework. So you could just implement the parts of the API you are using on your own webserver and point at that server when running your tests.
If you'd prefer your tests to be self-contained, you could implement an Http server that runs on the device. Examples of using the Http server available in the Android class library are here and here.
I only want to send an html form by post method to a https resource from an Android activity.
I have (only for development and testing) an Lighttpd server with it own certificate to make handshaking, so there MUST happen authentication at least from server (client authentication is optional but desirable).
I have seen, lots of forums with different ways to make it, but I am a little confused, I do not know which could be the correct way to make it.
Please show me a chunk of code.
Thank you very very much.
Try out this tutorial, it shows GET, POST and Multipart POST request on the android platform
http://www.softwarepassion.com/android-series-get-post-and-multipart-post-requests/
I wrote some code to submit an HTML form to a server over https, which can be found in this answer. The version in the answer uses an HttpsUrlConnection, and the version in the question uses HttpClient. I could never quite get the right result from the server with the HttpClient version, but either approach should work in theory.