How to link Android application and web-service?

Question

I made an Android application and I have a web-service (written in PHP). The service must send a message to application, so while my Android application works in the background and monitors web-service, it gets the message from service.

How can I organize this interaction? Thank you

Answer 1

C2DM is probably the most efficient way to push notifications to your android phone (no extra polling needed). Give it a look.

If you want to do it with the background service, you can set the service to be woken up every x minutes with AlarmManager and send http request to your server to check for updates. However this does consume battery if you do it too often.

Answer 2

There are many examples on the web with a quick google search or even on here.

A couple of samples:

http://blog.dahanne.net/2009/08/16/how-to-access-http-resources-from-android/ http://lukencode.com/2010/04/27/calling-web-services-in-android-using-httpclient http://www.anddev.org/calling_a_web_service_from_android-t348.html

Remember that anything that could take time should be run in a thread outside of the UI thread

I'd suggest using a Handler Please have a read of this performance article