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What can I use so that the Android application can interact with the rails application

I am trying to create an application that basically allows a user on an Android device to send a message that instantly appears in the rails application. Anyone have suggestions on what I will use for this?

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Here is a quick walkthrough.

Preparing the base application

Let me create a new rails application

$ rails new simple-message $ cd simple-message/

Now we will create a RESTful resource called Message, which will manage the messages coming from your mobile phones.

 $ rails generate scaffold Message title:string content:text

Create a table that will contain the messages:

 $ rake db:migrate

Start the limited server and point the browser to http://0.0.0.0{000/messages

From there, you can manually create new messages that will be displayed in a list.

Your API already exists

For each page that you can move in your browser, there is a corresponding view that accepts program calls from other clients.

If you look at http://0.0.0.0{000 /messages.xml, you will get an xml containing all your posts. With curl:

 $ curl http://localhost:3000/messages.xml <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <messages type="array"> <message> <created-at type="datetime">2010-11-27T18:24:36Z</created-at> <title>Just a message</title> <updated-at type="datetime">2010-11-27T18:24:36Z</updated-at> <id type="integer">1</id> <content>With some content</content> </message> </messages>

Time to add a new message:

 $ curl -X POST -H 'Content-type: text/xml' -d '<message><title>Hello</title><content>How are you</content></message>' http://0.0.0.0:3000/messages.xml <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <message> <created-at type="datetime">2010-11-27T18:40:44Z</created-at> <title>Hello</title> <updated-at type="datetime">2010-11-27T18:40:44Z</updated-at> <id type="integer">2</id> <content>How are you</content> </message>

Your Android client will need to act like a curl to add new messages.

Protect your web application

Now you need authentication to allow only a specific user to act as an administrator and restrict the use of your API. Before digging for a different way to implement authentication in Rails:

  • Does your user need to authenticate before sending a message?
  • if the web application accepts authentication from other services (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Google, OAuth, OpenID ...) or against its own user database?
  • Is your API open to other clients, or only your Android client can send messages?
  • Do you need to know who sent the message (i.e. user login)?
  • Do you want to block a single user or posting application in your web application?

You can find a good description of the various strategies here .

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The best way to do this is to create an API for your rails application. You can then use the HTTP request after your Android app.

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If you respect REST paradigms, it's as simple as POST for URLs.

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