App Inventor for Android: Build Your Own Apps — No Experience Required!

Appendix B: Creating Your Own TinyWebDB

The TinyWebDB component that is used in Chapter 7 stores and retrieves information across the Internet. An App Inventor application can use the TinyWebDB to maintain a database off of the Android device. This is accomplished by sending requests to store and get information from a database that resides on a Web server. The Web server where the TinyWebDB database resides must be running the TinyWebDB service. The TinyWebDB service listens for and responds to the GET and STORE requests.

These instructions help you install and configure the TinyWebDB service on a free Google Apps server. The instructions include downloading a version of the TinyWebDB service that has been built with the Python programming language. You can run the TinyWebDB service on your own Web service or your local computer. Instructions for customizing the Python code to run on your own server are beyond the scope of this book. If you are interested in customizing the TinyWebDB, research customizations on the App Inventor forum and the App Inventor Resources site at http://appinventor.googlelabs.com and https://sites.google.com/site/appinventorresources/.

Before beginning, download the following files:

• The Python App Engine for Google App Engine from code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html#Google_App_Engine_SDK_for_Python

• The Python code for the TinyWebDB Web service from http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/learn/reference/other/tinywebdbassets/customtinywebdb.zip