CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaphpandroiddatabaseweb-services
user2659937
user2659937

Reputation: 37

Database change notification app

I'm about to embark upon writing an android app which notifies the phone's user when an external mySQL DB is updated (add only) with a ticket so that the user can check if the ticket requires his attention (an attempt to reduce the buildup of tickets that he has to trawl through).

From my research, most questions suggest using a PHP web service with my program (written in java) and definitely/maybe/definitely not/it's deprecated using SQLNotification to fire the event. I've also seen something about some bloke called JSON and the brands of SOAP he uses.

What I've been unable to figure out is how all of these frameworks/toolkits/services/things work together.

My question is in two parts:

  1. Is SQLNotification usable? If not, is there a simple way to check for changes (beyond the obvious answer of polling)
  2. How does everything (SOAP, JSON, web service, app) fit together and have I missed anything on the frameworks front (Heard mentions of spring, hibernate, tomcat).

On my experience, I'm relatively fluent in Java, understand the basics of MySQL, am a beginner in PHP and haven't written for android before.

Thanks,

Ben

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1449

Answers (1)

Martin
Martin

Reputation: 3058

According to the information you have provided, seems like you have different options:

  • Push
  • Pull
    • If you go the pull way (polling), you can have a service working on the phone wich polls every configured time. In that case you will need some stateless service, some simple JSON service would do great.

On both cases, be careful with security, you should secure your channel with ssl and have some decent sort of authentication.

I think a good rule of thumb is saying (it's just based on personal opinion/experience, maybe your decision path has other factors that you have to consider), if your pollig intervals don't need to be lower than 5 minutes, polling will do fine. If you need almost real-time notifications, you can implement the push architecture, but you have to know it will cost more efford to get it working as you have to take care of things like client disconnection, how to handle notifications if a client is not connected, get the real-time notifications from the database, etc.

Hope this helps as a starting point,

Upvotes: 1

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