Android communicating with servers

Question

I come from a .Net background and recently x-training to java.

I wanted to develop an Android application that required simple functionality to communicate with a server. For example, functionality such as post a username/score to a website (or service), or request information such as top 10 scores.

What type of communications should I focus on? What is the common technology to use? Does Java have the equivalent of WCF? Or does it have some sort of simple web service? Can web services be secured with authentication?

Ive heard other references to xml-rpc. Should this be something I should look into?

Answer 1

Java has the equivalent of WCF in the fact that you can develop Web Services with Java and use frameworks to develop such services to benefit from different features. The format which you send messages to these web services I think is what you are asking as such you literally can use any format you want (Dependent on support of such format by the service). You will find libraries for many of the well known formats like SOAP (KSOAP2), REST (JSON,XML) etc... Since the transport of these can be over HTTP, and you get a library in android to develop such services over HTTP you have quite a choice.

For Reference:

http://ksoap2.sourceforge.net/
https://metro.dev.java.net/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/cc950529.aspx

Hope this helps,

Andrew

Answer 2

Depends on what your server is running. I usually just use URLs to fetch and/or send data and then parse the response with whatever is suited (such as org.json for JSON or org.w3c.dom for XML or HTML).

Answer 3

Without knowing all of your requirements but assuming it's gaming-related, you might be better served trying one of the Android gaming APIs rather than trying to roll-your-own networking solution. Scoreloop and OpenFeint, the two I am currently considering for my own Android game, both offer Android APIs that make it fairly straight-forward for posting and retrieving high-scores, in addition to other game-related features such as challenges and social network integration.

The advantage of this option is that you don't have to worry about how the phone talks to the server nor do you have to host the server itself - they have already solved those problems for you - and they're free which makes it great for us indie developers.