Android App Development and Web Server Interactions

Question

I am just learning about Android Development so excuse me if this is a bit off in nature. I am wanting to make an app that interacts with a Database from my website, in a se

Answer 1

The approach you mention in the question: PHP on the server and JSON for requests/responses, does work. But getting it perfect can be tricky.

I found it helpful to have small request/reponse classes for each call on the Android side, like SaveNoteToServerRequest, SaveNoteToServerResponse classes which are just plain java objects with whatever fields are needed for the request/response. Then you can use a library like GSON to convert the request object to JSON and convert the http response from JSON to the response object.

On the PHP side you can create a small class for the response object, then json_encode at the end.

That way you're not directly manipulating JSON objects, just using your own plain java objects or php classes most of the time.

Hope that helps.