I am very new to both Android development & Azure Mobile Services. I have a decent knowledge of Java so Android development is not proving to be too difficult. Although, I am struggling to gain a good knowledge of working with Azure Mobile Services.
I have little knowledge of REST API's but will be able to learn quite quickly if required. My main concerns/questions are as followed:
Can I build my Android app by using Mobile Services Data & API's alone. i.e the simple table values and the basic CRUD API's?
If not, how should I approach building the application?
I want to cater for multiple column queries, table relationships (1 .. n , inheritance) and I also would like to use JSON objects as parameters for a more lightweight communication rather than passing my full Java objects.
Also, is the possibility of setting up an SSL available?
Any help would be appreciated.
thanks for trying out Azure Mobile Services. Here is a good tutorial on how to get started with Android.
To answer your questions specifically:
Generally a CRUD API for data storage and a custom API for arbitrary REST calls should be all you need for a straightforward app, and those are all offered in the box with Mobile Services. The one thing we don't offer today (but are considering) is support for duplex messaging (WebSocket), which you might need if you are building a realtime app or game.
Mobile Services does not support object trees on the client, but you can still have them in your server database. You just have to write some custom code to "flatten" the hierarchy before you send it to the client.
Every mobile service supports HTTPS by default. We do not currently allow you to do a custom SSL cert.
Related
Application insights can used to monitor custom application events (such as calls, exceptions, durations etc).
The documentation gives SDKs for .net, and an agent for java. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/platforms
We are using java, but its hosting by Adobe (its their cloud CMS called AEM), so we cant run or install any agent. We can include java libraries, and cam make rest calls going out.
The question is, does AI have any sort of rest API to get application monitoring data into AI? Azure as a whole has one (e.g. for querying resource groups) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/azure/
NOTE: this is not to query AI data, there is a specific API for that, we need an API to write the event and telemetry data into it.
I don't think it is officially published (REST API for ingestion).
At the same time the wire protocol is used by both all SDKs and by many customers who decided to use REST API directly. So, essentially REST API will not change.
One way is to build an app using agent, sniff wire protocol using Fiddler (or similar tool) and then use it as REST API.
Beware that Application Insights SDKs (and agents) take care of many things - starting from auto collection, calculating standard metrics and finishing with proper backoff logic/retries/etc.
On top of it Application Insights SDKs support two channels - Standard and Real-time (Live Metrics/Diagnostics). Implementing the second channel might be quite tricky.
Is it correct that Android application which communicates with external database (somewhere on the server), requires web service (e.g. java web service)?
Is that web service an actual back end application which directly communicate with the DB?
Is this service, I am talking about, the same thing what AWS or google cloud offers, or am I messing it up?
Cloud providers can provide you computers and other hardware to run your back end server on and in some cases can provide you some or all of the services you need in your back end, obviously depending on what your app actually needs to do.
For example, AWS provides identify verification services, streaming recording backend services, notifications etc. You still need to do work to integrate your app with them but they do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
Deciding whether to use the services or just the HW with your own services built on top is an architectural and business decision really.
You may want to balance ease of integration against vendor lock in (i.e. being tied to a single cloud provider to run your back end).
Personally, I like architectures that can be ported between cloud providers - you can still build on non cloud provider 3rd party service building block software if you want.
Having said that, AWS and Google have almost certainly put a lot of effort and thought into making their service building blocks easy to integrate and scalable so you may find their ecosystems work for you.
Am I confused as to what is possible between an Android Client and Google App Engine? I would like to be able to create a Python API that would handle requests between GAE services such as Datastore, and an Android Client.
I have found some examples that detail how to make a call from within an Android Client, but it doesn't seem to outline whether or not you can pass data to any specific API language. The question I have is whether or not it is possible to use a Python API deployed on GAE and making calls through Google End Points, or would I have to use Java Servlets to handle requests?
Yes, you can use Python to do what you want.
Google designs their services (such as GAE and endpoints) to be language agnostic, e.g. using JSON to serialize objects.
There are a few advantages to using Java on both, such as being able to share code between client and service projects, but Google does not promote such dependencies at all - you will have no problem using Python instead.
Are there any standard architectures employed when building iOS/Android applications that require server-side functionality? For example, if an iOS app. needs to fetch a list of books from the server side, what/how does it do it? Does it use webservices? Does it use RPCs? What infrastructure is generally preferred for such applications? I've read about ways to encode data structures and objects using things like Protocol buffers and Thrift but nothing about an overall architecture that just lets me code my client-side and server-side logic. Will a simple spring/hibernate web-app work?
I hope the question makes sense and is a valid one.
Thank you
For Android, Google have started to produce tooling around integration with AppEngine using RPC. This Google IO video runs through the new tooling, or the highlights can be found on this blog post.
I'm creating an android application. Most of the functionality will be done offline, however I need to build some dependency between users of the application, such as being able to see peoples "high scores" and to communicate between users, and sending each other in-app messages.
Therefore, I'll need a webserver which the app can connect to in order to store such information. I imagine the app will make REST calls to get high scores.
I'm trying to avoid the overhead of having to create a fully functional web application (SpringMVC for example). Is there any application that makes this simpler?
What is a good, simple web stack I could use for this?
We use the Java RESTlet framework for creating RESTful interfaces for our mobile apps, and deploy via Google AppEngine. I shared a series of screencasts on YouTube demonstrating this approach that you might find useful. The RESTlet framework used in the screencasts is a few versions old, but this should help you get up to speed fairly quickly. We like this particular approach because it's straightforward for Android developers (who are already proficient in Java), scales well, and its free until you hit Google's quotas.