Chapter 8. Messaging and Networking
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER
How to send SMS messages programmatically from within your application
How to send SMS messages using the built-in Messaging application
How to receive incoming SMS messages
How to send e-mail messages from your application
How to connect to the Web using HTTP
How to consume Web services
Once your basic Android application is up and running, the next interesting thing you can add to it is the capability to communicate with the outside world. You may want your application to send an SMS message to another phone when an event happens (such as when you reach a particular geographical location), or you may wish to access a Web service that provides certain services (such as currency exchange, weather, etc.).
In this chapter, you learn how to send and receive SMS messages programmatically from within your Android application.
You will also learn how to use the HTTP protocol to talk to web servers so that you can download text and binary data. The last part of this chapter shows you how to parse XML files to extract the relevant parts of an XML file — a technique that is useful if you are accessing Web services.
SMS MESSAGING
SMS messaging is one of the main killer applications on a mobile phone today — for some users as necessary as the phone itself. Any mobile phone you buy today should have at least SMS messaging capabilities, and nearly all users of any age know how to send and receive such messages. Android comes with a ...
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