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Apps Picking dev platform where db connectivity needed

A

aarprogrammer

Lurker
Yes hello, first post.

Unfortunately I'm an expert in several computer languages that are increasingly obsolete :( I'm looking to develop an android app & teach myself a new language.

Requirements for the app are that it can accept user input and record it in an oracle database that already resides on my home server.

I downloaded Android Studio & worked my way thru the "Hello World" tutorial but I want to make sure this platform is suitable before I go much further. I'm unclear on what everyone uses for developing android apps.
 
Hi and welcome to the forum. It's sadly a fact of life that many programming languages are invented, and go out of use. But you've made a great choice in moving to mobile apps, which I believe will have enough longevity for a good few years. Well combine this with web applications, and you're on to a winner.
Good news is that the app you're thinking of developing has a lot of relevant technologies involved. To answer your question, Android Studio is the officially recommended, and supported development platform for Android applications. It's an absolutely superb IDE, and very professional. Updates are frequent, so it is constantly being improved.

Working through tutorials is a great way of getting into it. Android Studio offers some pretty powerful tools, including a GUI designer, and you can deploy your app for testing on a virtual device (emulator), or an actual physical device such as a smartphone. I find this approach much better in terms of performance, and it's a very quick turnaround from code changes to testing.
There are also some pretty nice unit test frameworks. At the moment I'm using Espresso, which allows me to automate my UI testing.

To get the app to talk to your Oracle database, I would suggest that some sort of web interface is required. This will allow you to be flexible in the future, in terms of different clients wanting to connect to it, if needed.

Best way to start is to get right in there writing code, but start simple and build up your knowledge. There's also a lot of great books out there. Any questions you have, feel free to ask!
 
Thank you both! So I'm not wasting my time - perfect.

While that's all I really need to know for the moment, I'm not sure what you mean by this;

LV426 said:
To get the app to talk to your Oracle database, I would suggest that some sort of web interface is required. This will allow you to be flexible in the future, in terms of different clients wanting to connect to it, if needed.
Click to expand...

I was expecting something like "call this class/function, and you will need to install this package on the server that houses the oracle db, this will enable xml msg's to get fired back & forth" or something to that effect. Am I seeing this wrong?
 
aarprogrammer said:
Thank you both! So I'm not wasting my time - perfect.

While that's all I really need to know for the moment, I'm not sure what you mean by this;



I was expecting something like "call this class/function, and you will need to install this package on the server that houses the oracle db, this will enable xml msg's to get fired back & forth" or something to that effect. Am I seeing this wrong?
Click to expand...

Well ask yourself, what is the process by which the xml messages get transmitted between your app and the server?
It is basically a networking problem, which is handled these days by a client/server model, and the web (HTTP). There are lower level network protocols you can use, but HTTP I would think is what you need.
There are libraries available which take the pain out of creating an HTTP client, and are quite simple to use though.
Your data format can be XML, but another common format is JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), which is just another structured data format, but becoming very popular.

I haven't used Oracle myself, so it could be that it provides some network capable interface, but the most common approach is to have a web server intercept your client's web requests, and execute some code to talk to your database. Now the 'code' could be PHP, or a servlet, often implemented in Java.
The response can be data retrieved from the DB.

Actually having said all that, it appears that there is a way of connecting a remote client directly to an Oracle DB server. Have a look at this:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...o-connect-between-android-and-oracle-database
 
Is it protocol to say thank you here? If so thank you!! If not pls delete this :D

Time for me to progress a little more in my tutorials before asking more.
 
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