Introduction to Android programming platform. Design consideration for developing web services for Android apps.

1. Android And Web Services
Leong Hean Hong
hong@codeandroid.my
PHP User Group Meetup
3rd November 2009
(CC) BY

2. Overview
● What is Android?
● Devices
● Marketplaces
● Communities
● Development Environment
● Android and iPhone Differences
● Accessing Web Services

3. What Is Android?
● “Android™ delivers a complete set of software for mobile
devices: an operating system, middleware and key mobile
applications.”
● Part of Open Handset Alliance
● Apache License v2
● Built on Linux kernel
● Eclair SDK 2.0 released on 27th Oct 209

4. Devices
● HTC
○ Dream (G1, Android Dev Phone 1), Magic (Ion), Hero,
Tattoo
● Motorola
○ CLIQ, DROID
● Samsung
○ I7500
● LG
○ GM620

5. Marketplaces
● Distribution of apps is not limited to a single channel
● Can be as simple as emailing the package to your friend
● Some marketplaces:
○ Google Android Market
○ SlideME
○ Motorola

6. Communities
● CodeAndroid
○ Monthly meetups
○ Regional (Malaysia, Thailand)
● Anddev.org (active, friendly)
● Google groups (http://developer.android.
com/community/index.html)

7. Development Environment
● Sun JDK
● Eclipse (MOTODEV Studio)
● SDK
○ Java - SDK 2.0
○ C/C++ - NDK 1.6

8. Android and iPhone Differences
● Licensing
● Distribution channels
● Device diversity
● Process and thread
● Application(GUI, non-GUI, background services)

9. Accessing Web Services
● Platform neutral web standards: HTTP, XML, JSON
● HTTP
○ java.net.HttpURLConnection
○ org.apache.http.client.*
● XML
○ org.w3c.dom
○ org.xml.sax
○ org.xmlpull.* (performance in constrained environment,
incremental parsing)
● JSON
○ org.json
○ json-lib ("for transforming beans, maps, collections, java
arrays and XML to JSON and back again to beans and
DynaBeans")

10. References
● Connecting to Web Services on Android
● Android Snippet
● Hello World
● Sample code for HTTP POST and GET
● API References

11. Question?
http://bit.ly/android_php