Android Networking: Fundamentals

Great job reaching the end of the first part of this course! :]

You’ve learned so much about REST, HTTP, JSON and a bunch of other concepts that come with networking nowadays!

You used an HttpURLConnection to connect to the remote server, and its input and output streams to send or receive data.

You then proceeded to follow many of the standards and approaches REST describes, to define the endpoint path and the REST method for requests.

You also added things like headers, to describe the data types used in requests, and the authorization header, for the user token.

Before sending the data, and after receiving the response, you had to use various approaches to data parsing. This was necessary because the data was in the JSON format, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation.

Given that a good amount of the web today is run on JavaScript, it’s one of the most used formats for sending and receiving data.

Parsing is the concept of translating from one format to another, by using the keys stored in one object, to translate the values behind those keys, to properties of another object.

While parsing, you used manual methods, like the JSONObject, and more automatic methods, like the GSON parser.

That was quite a lot of new concepts, and I hope you’re enjoying the course so far! :]

In the next part, you’ll learn how to achieve all the functionality you implemented so far, with a lot less code, and without having to worry about things like threading, using the most used networking library on Android - Retrofit! See you in the next part! :]