How can I make an online server to access API's and handle requests? Then how can I have my android app access this online server to make requests?
I have an android app that I am building for a school project. This app will need to use multiple APIs to gather information to display to the user. However I don't want to allow people to decompile to source code and take my API keys. My plan is to build an online application that will do all of this work on the server side. This way the user only submits a query and the server sends information in response to their request. This will speed things up for the user and keep the keys from being accessed by other individuals.
Steps I think I need to take.
Set up server to access the API's
Make app access online server through HTTP requests
3....
4...
I have a very general concept in my head, but I'm not sure where to begin. If I'm wrong on any part of this question please correct me.
I do plan on moving this to the app store in the future.
edit: Do you know of tutorials that show the building of the API and then loading it to Amazon AWS or another server?
There are many options when building restful services for api consumption. You could start with php, which is the easiest to start with. Here is a nice tutorial that takes you through the initial stage all the way to the end of building login system for android using mysql and php as the server language. It contains the barebone details of setting up the infrastructure and logic. I think from there you manipulate and go further.
https://www.androidhive.info/2012/01/android-login-and-registration-with-php-mysql-and-sqlite/
check out java rest easy, it is a nice tool to use to build web API's. You can host it for cheap at red shift or amazon using their pay what you use billing.
The cheapest way for you to host your REST API is to use Amazon's API Gateway. You pay for what you use and pay nothing if it is not being used. API Gateway plays very nicely with Amazon's Lambda service that allows you to run discrete code units - again, you only pay for what you use. Lambda itself plays nicely with Amazon's pay-as-you go NoSQL datastores (SimpleDB and DynamoDB).
Related
I am new in android development and i have been developing android apps using cloud firebase but how can i make an app for a website which is not using firebase. I know i need to connect to its database but what if the website is hosted on wordpress.com which does not provide phpmyadmin. So is there any other way? I know there is something called rest api. Can we use rest api in websites that are developed in some framework like codeignitor? Please explain what rest api is and is there any other way to get the data for our app? Please let me know thank you.
This is going to be tough. Usually, an application communicate with a web service. A web service may be a Rest API, Firebase or any hosted service that can provide data (I don't know all of the subtilities of it).
Explaining to you how all of this works wouldn't work here as it will be objective as every application have different needs and every developper have preferences on how he want his application to communicate with the world.
One thing you should avoid at all costs would be to access an online database directly from your application as it is a huge security flaw.
Here are some links that will help you understand better all of this.
REST API concepts and examples
Make an HTTP request with Android
Web services explained
I am well aware that stackoverflow answer shouldn't be mainly links but I still thinks that they will be relevant to your problem. Be aware that this answer doesn't even cover a little part of communication between an application an a webservice. You'll have to learn that by yourself, using courses and tutorials.
I am going to develop uber-like application.Here I have to send latitude and longitude to web and mobile devices continuously with my service,What I have do to get this.
Can anyone please give some idea.
You should start by designing how the application is to be used, seen from all the different users perspectives.
For instance is this a web app, or a native app, or both?
Then from that knowledge, you need to define a communication protocol.
You should be able to determine if the client will be polling for data, or if you need to push it from the server onto the clients.
This also goes for the data that travels the other way.
From here you choose a language for programming, and then start doing some proof of concept tests.
The choice will depend on the chosen underlying technologies
(web / native / os / available libraries)
After some test work you may have something that works, then you need to review or add security to the communication, cause we do not want everyone collecting location data from everyone that has the app installed.
Then run beta trials and eliminate the worst bugs, and then release the app.
You'll want some sort of asynchronous task which can get new data from your server and refresh the mobile and web 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/
Currently I have a very basic desktop Java application in Eclipse that is meant to add entities to an existing project's datastore on Google App Engine. I have it all setup right now but since I am new to working with Google App Engine, I have no clue on how to get the application to send the Entities into the datastore of my existing project.
I tried looking this up online but most of what I found was for making java web apps. My goal is to have the application running as its own application, not through a browser.
So, what do I have to do to make the application connect to my GAE datastore? Is there some code I need to type, or perhaps some xml file I need to have within the project? I am just using the Java Eclipse plugin for Google App Engine.
Thanks for the help!
Based on the language of your question, I think you really need a big-picture sort of answer, rather than any specific code. Therefore:
You have a desktop application. This runs on some desktop computer.
You have a Google App Engine application with its data store. This runs in Google's data centers.
These are not the same computer. Therefore, they must communicate over the network in some fashion — that is the missing piece you're looking for.
Since GAE is designed around doing web applications, I recommend you think of this as a “web service” situation — that is, your desktop application makes HTTP requests to your GAE application. (The situation is simplified over the general case because you are writing both the client and the server.)
I recommend you read about designing simple web services and do whatever seems to fit your application.
One important warning: Unless your GAE application only ever has one user, you must not simply write a bridge that gives access to the data store over HTTP, because then anyone can make arbitrary changes to other people's data. As it is said for multiplayer game design: don't trust the client — that is, only accept network requests that make sense according to the rules of your application, and do not expect the client to enforce those rules. This is because anyone can make requests to your GAE application using something other than your desktop application, so you must assume you could receive arbitrary requests. This is the fundamental nature of the Internet.
For example, in the simple case of a multi-user application whose users do not interact with each other using the application, this means that every request that, say, updates a record, should only update a record which belongs to the logged-in user, not one of any other user.
For anyone that gets this problem in the future, I got an answer to it. I just tried experimenting around with the project settings and found it. So as it turns out, after you have installed the GAE Eclipse Plugin, you can just right click your project folder in the Package Explorer, go the Google sub menu, then click on App Engine Settings... .
From there, you need to check the Use Google App Engine checkbox, then in the deployment section, just fill in your project's Application ID. Your project's application ID can be found under the Application Settings tab of your project's online Google app engine dashboard. It is listed there as your Application Identifier.
Turns out that for me, I will need to find a different solution as you cannot integrate GAE with a desktop application that uses the Java Swing library. Bummer :/
I would like to repeatedly (every second) ask for the message (object or value) to GAE (if android client did not create or change something there) from another android device. I need to check it pretty fast, but I know that it happens aproximately once in hour.
I use restlet and I don't want to create new thread and poll by get from this thread every second, because this is very battery consuming. I also don't want to use C2DM.
Is it somehow possible to do this? I have found something about NIO nonblocking http connectors here:
http://restlet-code.1609877.n2.nabble.com/Push-data-from-server-using-a-live-HTTP-connection-td2906563.html
But here is described only the client side and I also don't know if this solution would even be possible to use on GAE and how. Does anyone know more about this approach?
Thank you very much in advance.
As the author of uniqush, I created an entry in the FAQ page specific to this question.
Can I use uniqush on Google App Engine?
Yes and no.
If you just want to use GCM on Google App Engine, then there are some code in uniqush-push which you can directly use.
However, because Google App Engine does not support socket connection, there is no way to use APNS. In another work, if you want to setup a server on Google App Engine, you cannot push any notification to iOS devices no matter what software/library you are using.
I did considered to port uniqush to Google App Engine. But because of this fact, I think it may be better to port it until Google let us use client-side socket connections, or provide some way to connect to APNS server.
Again, if you are considering to use Google App Engine as a server for your App, please be aware that you will not be able to push notification to any iOS device right now. If this fact does not bother you, then do it.
Personally, I recommend you to run a server with full control. It is not expensive nowadays. Amazon EC2 or similar cloud products may be a good choice to run uniqush.
As I recommended above, using a (virtual) server with full control would be a better choice if you want to support more platforms besides Android.
If there is any other question, please feel free to reply.
For being future proof I would suggest you have a single push notification service for both kind of devices. You can either build on your own, or leverage something like uniqush or this
Also the Urban Airship's SDK would be a good option to look at, more details here
this is similar to Urban Airship but only a fraction of the cost. The API allows you to send a C2DM message to a user via a call. After you implement the broadcast reciever, when a user installs the app they are prompted to accept the message. If they accept a token is sent to the C2DM server identifying the user. This token is then used to send them a message via the C2DM platform. The Zend PHP Framework has built in functions for this but if reliability is a concern go with an external provider like Remote Queries or Urban Airship
I need to add a functionality to my java-based web application that will allow users to click on a link and the application will automatically call the user and another party and connect them in a phone call.
Does anybody know what would this entail?
Thanks
It can be done with Twilio, and their new, easy Conferencing API. Trust me, it's really really simple. Another option might be CloudVox, but I haven't (formally) tried their service yet.
The World-Wide Web Consortium has an integrated set of speech interaction standards that you'll find interesting. There's a markup language called VoiceXML that is analogous to HTML in that web applications generate it. It differs from HTML in that it's specialized for temporally-based speech interactions instead of visual interactions. So instead of looking at a screen you listen to audio prompts and computer-generated speech. Instead of typing and mousing, you speak back and what you say is processed by a speech recognizer or recorded.
There are many companies using VoiceXML to automate voice response systems, and they handle billions of calls per year. You've probably talked to them many times without realizing it. One of the best companies in this space is Voxeo, and they have a developer site at http://evolution.voxeo.com/ that you can play with. Evolution lets you call your web application over an ordinary phone (or Skype). You actually talk to a VoiceXML-based web browser which will fetch a VoiceXML page from your Java application server, "play" it to you, listen to what you say, and then report that back to your app via a form submission, get the next page to render to you, etc.
Another related standard is CCXML, or Call Control XML. You use this to create teleconferences that may or may not include a voice response application.
So it sounds like in your case you want your standard web application to talk to a CCXML server and ask it establish call legs to the web user and to a customer service line. I know that Voxeo Evolution offers CCXML as well.
There are other good companies in this space too. One that comes to mind is TellMe, which was bought by Microsoft a year or two ago. These two companies (and others) offer professional services too.
So I wanted to write this up as an answer to the comment above. The Skype API provides a number of options for telephony in COM, Java and Python:
Skype4Java - https://developer.skype.com/wiki/Java_API
Skype4Py - https://developer.skype.com/wiki/Skype4Py
Skype4COM - https://developer.skype.com/Docs/Skype4COM
They provide a communication and command protocol layer for working with Skype, more info on the API here:
https://developer.skype.com/Docs/ApiDoc/Overview_of_the_Skype_API
It's kind of different for every platform, the Linux version is based on DBus or X11.
Try FreeSWITCH. I have done this before. Its pretty straight forward. Can be a bit hairy when you need to log call accounting and all those stuff. I hopefully would be able to provide you some guidelines and code samples, let me get home first. Cheers.
The good thing in using FreeSWITCH, you will be able to handle multiple calls, and quite a number of. You might need that in future.
Note: You have to use some kind of VoIP provider in order to do that. I was using Gizmo5 that time and it was pretty good.
Sorry buddy, lost the servlet code somewhere. But no worries it was a simple servlet. Fortunately, I had added my example Java code for XML-RPC, into the FreeSWITCH wiki, and actually that was the code my servlet was invoking down the road. Below is the snippet.
XmlRpcClientConfigImpl config = new XmlRpcClientConfigImpl();
XmlRpcClient client = new XmlRpcClient();
try {
config.setServerURL(new URL("http://localhost:8080/RPC2"));
config.setBasicUserName("freeswitch");
config.setBasicPassword("works");
client.setConfig(config);
// For external phone calls using VoIP. We will use something like below.
// new Object[]{"originate", "sofia/gateway/gizmo1/6098989898 &bridge(sofia/gateway/gizmo9/0116054545454)"}
// gizmo1, and gizmo9 are the accounts configured under freeswitch gateway configuration.
client.execute("freeswitch.api", new Object[]{"originate", "sofia/internal/1001 &park()"});
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
}
Moreover, you need to configure few things prior doing this. You need to set up the gateway using your VoIP provider settings.
For FreeSWITCH related help, take a look at this SO Thread.
I know of 2 API providers that does what you need:
1) twilio - can connect to 2 or more parties using TwiML (their markup). example
2) Hoiio - very easy to use with 1 line of RESTful api call. example