Book Image

Mastering Android Application Development

By : Antonio Pachon
Book Image

Mastering Android Application Development

By: Antonio Pachon

Overview of this book

There are millions of Android apps out there for people to download – how do you make sure yours has the edge? It’s not always about innovation and ideas – the most successful apps are those that are able to satisfy customer demands – they’re the ones that look the best, the fastest, and the easiest and most intuitive to use. This book shows you how to create Android applications that do precisely that – it has been designed help you consider and answer those questions throughout the development process, so you can create applications that stand out against the crowd. Learn how to create exemplary UIs that contribute to a satisfying user experience through the lens of Material Design, and explore how to harness the range of features within the Android SDK to help you. Dive deeper into complex programming concepts and discover how to leverage concurrency and navigate memory management and image handling. You’ll also find further guidance on testing and debugging so you can guarantee that your application is reliable and robust for users. Beyond this you’ll find out how to extend your app and add greater functionality, including notifications, location services, adverts and app billing (essential if you want to properly monetize your creation!). To make sure you have confidence at every stage in the process, the book also shows you how to release your app to the Play store – to make sure your maximising your efforts to create a popular Android application!
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Android Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 3. Creating and Accessing Content from the Cloud

In this chapter, we will learn how to consume content from the Web using our application; this content could be a list of items inside an XML or JSON file (something that we wish to display), retrieved from the Internet. For instance, if we were building an app that shows the current weather conditions, we would need to contact an external API to retrieve all the information needed.

We will create our own cloud database in Parse, a service that allows us to do this really quickly without the hassle of creating and maintaining our own servers. Apart from this, we will populate the database with information to be displayed in MasteringAndroidApp.

We will also cover best practices regarding network requests with Google Volley, using the ultrafast HTTP library, OkHttp, and parsing the requested objects efficiently with Gson. We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Creating your own cloud database

  • Consuming content from Parse

  • Google...