Question

I am planning to make an online database which can be accessed by an applications created by myself ( which is android app). I’ve been looking for hours for the way to host it without using sharepoint, is it possible to host it in ftp from hosting provider? or is there any other way which you guys can suggest me to use? Thanks. I am really confused because there is so much way to do it and some of it is quiet expensive. I want to low down cost as much as possible.

Answer 1

It not clear if you talking about writing + creating a native android application and NOT simply use the web browser? I mean, if you going to use a web browser, then likely Access is not much important here unless you want to develop an Access application using the new “web services” options we have with Access.

If your android application just need to pull data from a web site, then you have to choose if the data going to be exposed from that web site as a web service, or are you talking about hitting some tables on the web site. If you talking about using tables and not a web interface, then that web site will have to allow external connections to the data store, and I not away of ANY web provider that allows external connections to a access file placed on a server. You don’t connect to power-point or word or in this case an Access file – file based systems don’t work that way.

You can certainly move the data tables out of an Access application and place them on some web server, and if that web server allows external (odbc) connections. So you then connect the existing Access application to the database server (typical SQL server or MySQL). This would mean the desktop users continue to use the Access application but the data now resides on the web server. Your android application would then also hit the same data store. However, in this case, note how the data store for Access is now not Access, but some kind of database server.

So it not clear if you need or require an existing Access application to continue operating, or you just looking to use some Access data in a android application? And it not clear if you created an Access web based application.

I mean, if you have an Access web based application, then you can hit those web forms with any browser – including ones on your android and you don’t have to do anything at all on the android side of things.

I been using Access web publishing, and the p1 small business plan at $6 per month is very low cost. The Access web forms thus can be used by any browser such as an iPad or thus on my windows 7 phone, a web screen built in Access looks like this on my phone:

or

So you have options, but if you don’t already have a Access web application, then you don’t need any special Access hosting, but just a web data store that allows both Access and your android can use (such as SQL server).

Using Access web publishing does allow massive scaling since the forms are converted into XAML forms, and the office 365 servers are not only massive, but the back end data store is now cloud computing and not Access “file” based. So, really no user limits in terms of scaling exist. So Access web publishing

However, if you don’t already have an Access web application, then Access likely does not need to be used here.

The unanswered question here is how do you plan for the android application to use the data, or are you willing to use a browser based application? If you using a browser based application then you don’t have to write any android software at all.

And to those not aware, Access now allows web publishing. In the following video note how at the half way point I switch to running the Access applicaiton 100% in a browser

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU4mH0jPntI