Question

I am developing an Android app which takes the current location of the user and displays a list of restaurants close to his/her location. The restaurants’ data is available to me (i.e I do have the lat/long of each restaurant I want to display in the search results). I can’t use Google Places API, because I need to show only those restaurants that are available in our database(in our website). My question is how do I access my database(or even an URL),which is on a computer, to extract the restaurants’ data and display as search results in my android app?
I am actually making a Seamless ( http://bit.ly/Jp7pUN ) type application for my company.
I am a complete newbie to android app development. So, pardon me if this is really a very broad or a stupid question. Please just tell me what topics I need to study to implement this. I would study and do it myself.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You will need:

• a Sqlite database to store the restaurants and their longitude/latitude
• a MapView to display the map (Don’t forget to register your Google Maps API key)
• a map overlay to show the markers on the map
• GPS access to get the user’s location (needs the appropriate Android permission)
• a simple search algorithm that retrieves a result set of restaurants within x distance of the user’s location

EDIT

If your database is stored on a server, you will need a way to query the server, preferably using an HTTP-based protocol such as REST. It is useful (but not required) to cache the restaurant locations on the Android device (using Sqlite), in case the user is offline (The good news: Since you can use Java both on Android and the server, 90% of your data access layer you will only need to write once).

For the data transfer from server to the Android client, JSON is a popular format.