Enterprise Android: Programming Android Database Applications for the Enterprise

Chapter 7

Mobile and the Cloud

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding cloud performance and scalability
• Considering mobile scalability, push, and synchronization
• Understanding cloud persistence: SQL and NoSQL
• Considering design issues when building scalable services
• Looking at some popular cloud providers
• Exploring the code examples: RESTful contacts using Amazon DynamoDB and Google App Engine

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

Please note that all the code examples in this chapter are available at https://github.com/wileyenterpriseandroid/Examples.git and as a part of the book’s code download at www.wrox.com on the Download Code tab.

Chapter 6 introduced a simple but functional backend RESTful contacts service based on SQL persistence. But now that you have a backend service, how will you deploy it? Will your chosen software technologies scale to meet demand as your traffic grows? If you don’t want to use your own service hardware, how do you pick from the many available cloud service platforms?

Most Android developers know that cloud providers will save them the hassle of building and maintaining their own massive banks of application servers, but persistence support and pricing arrangements vary widely. As you learned in Chapter 6 selecting a cloud provider and service software requires deep knowledge of several vendors and many different types of databases. This chapter digs into the design and capabilities of cloud-based software, and walks through the pros and cons ...