Instant Spring for Android Starter

Leverage Spring for Android to create RESTful and OAuth Android apps

Overview

• Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results.
• Learn what Spring for Android adds to the Android developer toolkit.
• Learn how to debug your Android communication layer observing HTTP requests and responses.
• Use OAuth to authenticate your users and your app against popular service providers (Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so on).

In Detail

The possibility to connect to remote web services is a key feature for most Android apps. REST (Representational State Transfer) is the most popular architecture to provide web services to mobile devices and others. OAuth has recently become the web’s favorite way to authenticate and authorize users and apps, thanks to its capability to re-use popular web platforms accounts (Google, Facebook, Twitter). Spring for Android is an extension of the Spring Framework that aims to simplify the development of native Android applications.

“Instant Spring for Android Starter” is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a number of clear step-by-step exercises, which will help you take advantage of the abstractions offered by Spring for Android with regard to REST (RestTemplate) and OAuth (OAuthTemplate). It will also introduce you to the bases of those architectures and the associated tooling.

This book gets you started using Spring for Android, first letting you know how to set up your workspace to include those libraries in your projects (with the Eclipse IDE and also with the popular building tool Maven) and then providing some clear and real life examples of RESTful and OAUth backed Android applications.

After introducing the technology, we’ll discover the different Message Converters provided (to consume JSON, XML, and Atom web services) and the main HTTP verbs to interact with RESTful webservices: GET, POST, DELETE, and UPDATE. We’ll also mention how to support HTTP Basic Auth, Gzip compression, and finally put in practice the OAuth workflow with a concrete example relying on the Google OAuth service provider to authenticate and authorize an app and users.

You will learn everything you need to consume RESTful web services, authenticate your users, and interact with their social platforms profiles from your Android app.

What you will learn from this book

• Set up your Eclipse workspace to include third party libraries (such as Spring for Android).
• Deal with dependencies using the Android Maven Plugin.
• Use m2e and its m2e-android connector to work with Maven based Android projects in Eclipse.
• Create an app connecting to a RESTful web service: using JSON, XML, and Atom messages.
• Create an app connecting to a RESTful web service: creating, deleting, updating, and retrieving data to and from this service.
• Enable HTTP BasicAuth and Gzip compression in your RESTful client app.
• Use the third party library Android Annotations to simplify your RESTful app code.
• Create an app authenticating the Google OAuth service provider and allowing access to the user basic and Google+ profiles.

Approach

Get to grips with a new technology, understand what it is and what it can do for you, and then get to work with the most important features and tasks. This is a Starter which gives you an introduction to Spring for Android with plenty of well-explained practical code examples.