Matrix Marketers is and Android App Development Company building apps that manage all the user data on a central database, REST API is used for architectural option to do the communication between the app and the server. These Android Apps can be uninstalled at any time and once we install them back and log in, all our data will be restored. The data is stored in the cloud and a REST API can be used to access it.

In this post, Matrix Marketer’s Android app developers are sharing their knowledge to build a REST API based Android apps. An Enterprise Android app application uses PHP and MySQL as the best combination for app development. When the scenario requires data to be stored in a centralized manner, then this architecture should be used. Otherwise, the local database in the mobile can be used for storage and retrieval of information.

RESTful services are well suited for providing content to Android-based smartphones. In fact, if you’ve interacted with any cloud-based APIs in the last couple of years, there is a strong chance that API was exposed via a REST interface.

Let’s see how we must use the classes and methods available in the Android SDK to connect to remote web servers and interact with them using their REST APIs.

Enabling Internet Access

Making use of a REST API  involves using the Internet. However, Android applications can access the Internet only if they have android permission. Therefore, before you start writing any networking code, you must make sure that the user permission tag is present in your project’s manifest file

Creating Background Threads

The Android platform does not allow you to run network operations on the main thread of the application. Therefore, all your networking code must belong to a background thread. The easiest way to create such a thread is to use the execute () method of the AsyncTask class. As its only argument, execute () expects a Runnable object.

Creating an HTTP Connection

By using the open Connection () method of the URL class, you can quickly set up a connection to any REST endpoint. The return value of open Connection () must be cast to an instance of either HttpURLConnection or HttpsURLConnection, depending on whether the endpoint is accessed over HTTP or HTTPS. Both allow you to perform operations such as adding request headers and reading responses.

Adding Request Headers

Most websites that offer REST APIs want to be able to identify your app uniquely. The easiest way to help them do so is to include a unique User-Agent header in all your requests.

To add a User-Agent header to your request, you must use the setRequestProperty () method of the HttpURLConnection object. Multiple headers can be added to your request by using setRequestProperty ().

Reading Responses

Once you have passed all the request headers, you can check if you have a valid response using the getResponseCode () method of the HttpURLConnection object.

A JSON file in most of the case is returned by most of the REST APIs

Parsing JSON Responses

A class called JsonReader, which makes it very easy for you to parse JSON documents for Android SDK. You can create a new instance of the JsonReader class by passing the InputStreamReader object to its constructor.How you extract a specific piece of information from the JSON document depends on its structure.

Conclusion

Many apps are registered on the Google Play Store and everyday many more are getting registered. If the Android apps are not providing exceptional features for the apps then the survival of these apps is quite difficult. To have a unique functionality, make use of RESTful APIs for android app development. If you want an android app to be developed by the expert developers , you may contact us!