Pro Android and Cloud Services

Jay Dellinger has been immersed in computers and software since a very young age. From modest beginnings tinkering with a TRS-80, through numerous IBM-compatible and Apple incarnations, up to the latest tablets and mobile devices of today, Jay has been passionate about technology. Jay received a B.S in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Alabama in 1997. He worked as an engineer with Lockheed Martin Aeronautical Systems in Marietta, GA for three years developing in-house software tools to aid the aircraft design process. In 2000, Jay joined Manheim as a software engineer and over the last 13 years has accumulated ample amounts of first-hand experience in developing high-volume corporate applications on various technology stacks. He also enjoys developing projects for himself and small businesses and organizations in his spare time. When he is not writing software, you can often find Jay engrossed in one of his other innumerable hobbies including flying, woodworking, or soldering electronics.

Introduction The initial introduction section is an overview of Android development and, in particular, integration with cloud based services in order to deliver a rich features to mobile app customers. It will layout the approach of this book as well as delve into the pros and cons of working in a connected environment with dependencies on external systems. High level discussions of the various techniques in later chapters will lay the groundwork for the upcoming information and exercises. Hands-on case studies will be presented in each of the following chapters to illustrate the topics. An integrated functional application will be developed by incorporating the techniques from each chapter as the book progresses. 1. Getting Connected Getting started will require some basic housekeeping around getting a project up and running and ready to use for the later exercises in this book. This should include an intro to the IDE and tools that will be used throughout the book as well wiring up the necessary app permissions, etc. This will also cover some of the service protocols and code libraries that will be common to many of the chapters. HelloWorld type examples for connected apps. keywords: eclipse, intellij, REST, JSON, XML, proxy servers, adb, ddms, JDWP 2. Performance and Reliability and the Cloud Performance considerations will be discussed early because they can often impact app design and architecture considerations. This will cover networking fundamentals and best practices to avoid bottlenecks and single points of failure. Also important here is the foresight to expect interruptions with external services and make informed decisions on how to deal with outages and degrade gracefully in the event that problems do occur. keywords: asynctasks, background services, caching, sqlite databases, syncadapters, cell/wifi connectivity 3. Integrating Data Service APIs This chapter begins a deep dive into integration of third party social media and data services. Topics ranging from consuming various APIs, to generating original content for third parties, to combining two or more services to create new and innovative will be covered. Another area of discussion will be managing the difficulties of being prepared for external service changes (i.e. version compatibility, both forwards and backwards) to minimize impact to users. With the exercises in this chapter, the reader will gain exposure to the idiosyncrasies of different vendors and how to be better equipped to handle them. keywords: OAuth, API key, API discovery, REST, JSON, XML 4. Identity Management and Authorization Dealing with user identity in a connected app can is often the first design hurdle when conceptualizing a new app. This chapter will look at some various approaches for identifying users, whether dealing with a new app or integrating a legacy user base. Custom authentication/authorization vs third party authentication through common social media APIs will be discussed as well (e.g. Google, Facebook). keywords: identity, session, OAuth, API Key, Basic Auth, SAML 5. Custom Services with Google App Engine With service integration from the client side under the reader's belt, this chapter moves into the discussion of developing customer services and content to power app development. There are various use cases where custom code may be required. For example, to achieve specific features not provided by a published API, integrating with legacy web or database systems, or to provide an abstraction layer in front of other external systems to mitigate risks and dependencies. There are several services provided by Google App Engine that can be utilized. keywords: Google App Engine, proxy services, caching, API Key, memcache, cloud SQL, task queue 6. Custom Services with Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services will be discussed as a parallel to Google App Engine. The various additional services available via AWS will be discussed as well. This will be similar in concept to chapter 5, but will be tailored for the AWS suite of services. keywords: Amazon Web Services, proxy services, caching, API Key, S3 storage, elastic cloud computing, elastic block storage, database, message queue 7. Push Notifications with Google Cloud Messaging This will cover the usage and best practices around Google Cloud Messaging to provide efficient notifications to apps. Discussions will include integrating GCM with exercises from chapters 4, 5, and 6. There are various use cases for integration this tool with user driven events, system events, or some of both to achieve certain features and provides much better performance and scalability for both client and server than with alternative architectures such as polling. keywords: google cloud messaging, app engine, push notifications, event-driven messaging 8. Monetization and Analytics Advertisements are common features in apps and this chapter will touch on some of the types of integration available. This will also move into in-app purchasing and how to combine these features to build revenue generators for your next app. Another important aspect covered in this chapter that is oftent over looked is analytics. The ability to successfully track and analyze usage pattersn, sales/conversions, as well as monitor client failures can prove to be invaluable when developing a professional application. Particularly if that app is being developed on behalf of a third party or client. keywords: advertisements, in-app purchases, analytics, conversion rates, user tracking