Question

I’ am supposed to write an application that lets you store data (contact informations) and sync that data to a server.

Now i am looking for an easy solution for the server side. -> an easy to set up web database that the app can communicate with, and a way to create a frontend, so that the customer can browse and maybe export the uploaded data.

Any suggestions? Could or should I use app engine for this?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I think App Engine perfectly fits for that.
Since you’re writing an Android app I guess that you’ll write also the App Engine part in Java.

For storing data there is something called Datastore
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/gettingstarted/usingdatastore.html

For the frontend there is the Google Web Toolkit short GWT
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/latest/tutorial/index.html

And because you’re sending data from the Android app to the server you probably need to authenticate the user. Here is a great article about that. For the communication then just use POST request.
http://blog.notdot.net/2010/05/Authenticating-against-App-Engine-from-an-Android-app

And use RPC for the browser client to App Engine communication
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/latest/tutorial/RPC.html

However if you had googled that you would have found it out yourself…