Coding REST Web Services on Google Android

When looking at utilitizing a SOA architecture to support SportsFlash, I had to investigate Android's ability to work with web services. From Google Android forums, I was first pointed to KSoap2 (http://ksoap2.sourceforge.net/), with implementations described here:

• http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/9b246db7d612a6b5/44bb777f03c5c8ac?


• http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/9b246db7d612a6b5/0f75e1da6be54209?lnk=gst&q=soap#0f75e1da6be54209

However, I was a little concerned by some of the difficulties described here, and I wanted to look at REST based services, which I thought would create the simple, lightweight API to our database that we require. I credit the publication "Unlocking Android", by W.Frank Albleson, Charlie Collins, Robi Sen, and Robert Cooper and Professor Ron Czik of Boston University. Using the SAX XML Parser

(http://code.google.com/android/reference/org/xml/sax/XMLReader.html)
you can create a REST Web Service that returns xml (or JSON), which is parsed by SAX.

A template for usuage could look like this:


try {
URL url = new URL(this.query + position);
SAXParserFactory spf = SAXParserFactory.newInstance();
SAXParser sp = spf.newSAXParser();
XMLReader xr = sp.getXMLReader();
ObjectHandler handler = new ObjectHandler();
xr.setContentHandler(handler);
xr.parse(new InputSource(url.openStream()));
// after parsed, get record
r = handler.getRecord();
} catch (Exception e) {
Log.e(Constants.LOGTAG, " " + CLASSTAG, e);
}

where your ObjectHandler is a class that extends DefaultHandler (http://code.google.com/android/reference/org/xml/sax/helpers/DefaultHandler.html) where you override methods like startDocument(), startElement(), characters() ... etc to handle the reading and parsing of your xml stream from your REST Web Service.