I have a set of computations that I am currently running on the Android. I want to move these computations from Android to a cloud (possibly google c2dm architecture or any other free service) but I dont have enough knowledge on how to use the c2dm. I will be sending a list of strings to the cloud, do lots of computations on the cloud and then return the rearranged list of strings to android.
Can anybody help me with this (as to how to connect the cloud with an android app)?
Thanks Anks
I think it depends of how heavy your computations are, or how much computation power do you need. you can try to write a simple app engine server which handles post requests and return a JSON format answer. in case your computations are complex i would use google compute engine and install my custom stack.
in both cases you would need to write a server side to handle your data. if you use google app engine you can write it in java, python, php or go. if you use compute engine you can basically write it in any language that you can run on linux.
hope it helped!
You could use HTTP POST-GET requests to communicate with server, send and receive JSON/xml data.
EDIT that's almost enough to leverage client-server communication in your app.
http://developer.android.com/reference/java/net/HttpURLConnection.html http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/x-android/ http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-andbene1/
I am unsure what you mean by "google cloud".
One way to achieve this would be to use Google App Engine. It allows you to run server applications developed in Java/Python on Google's infrastructure.
What this means is that you can develop the server side yourself, and therefore implement any protocol you like to communicate with clients, that is, create your own web service.
As Mighter mentioned you could perform raw HTTP requests. However, there are a number of existing protocols for remote procedure call: SOAP, XML-RPC, etc..
I personally tend to like JSON-based protocols. It's easy to make your own implementation for that type of protocol, but you may be interested by this JSON-RPC library for Android, as an example.
Also check this other question: How to call a SOAP web service on Android
Once you'll have your web service ready, whether using SOAP, JSON-RPC or else, then you should be able to create a client, and expose the remote service calls through Java classes. If well designed, it could 1. feel as if you were calling methods on a local object, and 2. allow you to swap with a local implementation in case the network is unavailable.
