Chapter 11Networking

Chapter 11 explains how your application can talk to the outside world through the use of SMS messaging and emails. Another way to communicate with the outside world is through the wireless network available on your Android device. In this chapter, you find out how to use the HTTP protocol to talk to web servers so that you can download text and binary data. Also, you see how to parse XML files to extract the relevant parts of an XML document—a technique that is useful if you are accessing web services. In addition to XML web services, this chapter also covers JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), which is a lightweight alternative to XML. You make use of the classes available in the Android SDK to manipulate JSON content.

Finally, this chapter also demonstrates how to write an Android application to connect to servers using TCP sockets. Using sockets programming, you can write sophisticated, interesting networked applications.

CONSUMING WEB SERVICES USING HTTP

One common way to communicate with the outside world is through HTTP. HTTP ...

Get Beginning Android Programming with Android Studio, Fourth Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.