Chapter 8
Web Services
A majority of Android applications work with data, either generated or consumed by the user. In most cases, the amount of data is too great to store on the device locally, so we need a way to keep data somewhere else and retrieve it. Web services provide this functionality by exposing application programming interfaces (APIs) on remote servers that our Android applications consume. In this chapter you will learn how to access those APIs and then how to build web services yourself, securely. But first you need to understand web services in a general way. Throughout the chapter, we will refactor our ToDo Android application, moving the data storage from a local SQLite database to a web service hosted in the cloud.
Get Android Best Practices now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
