Question

I am creating an Android application for a project at university.

I will have several databases hosted on the university servers ( We have a web development server).

I was going to create a Java server, however, due to the university firewalls and other security mechanisms, when hosted on the university, would not allow remote connections (from ones smart phone). I am learning as I go with the whole using Java for web development as such.

I want to be able to use the web server to handle requests from the phone application, fetch and manipulate the data from the databases, and then send a reply back to the phone.

Can I do this with servlets? And host this on the web development server?

Answer 1

You can use pretty much any technology you like on the server side – even the humble CGI script. So yes, servlets will work. As most frameworks do, java has its own application server (which in the LAMP world is tomcat) which can be interfaced to a vanilla webserver: if the webserver is apache, the usual interfacing mechanism would be mod_jk.

Wether you’ll be able to deploy it on the web development server, that very much depends on the platform; the accepted procedures, and your relationship with the sysadmins ;-). If it’s a Linux/unix platform chances are in your favor, if not, inquire within.

Cheers