Question

I have a Java based web application which is developed using JSP/Servlets running on Tomcat server. This application is developed for customer support. A customer can directly login to the application with his credentials and raise any complaints reg. a specific product. He can also view all the complaints he has raised and their status. Also he can add comments to the complaints and also close them when he desires to.

Now I would like to develop an Android app where a customer can login with his credentials and do same operations as he used to do in the above said web application.

I have basic knowledge on Android and good amount of knowledge in Java. Can someone help me with some guidelines or sample source code to develop such kind of application. In particular after authenticating a customer with his credentials from an Android activity by sending HTTP request to the web application, how do we keep track of the session for that customer in order to display him the complaints raised by him or allowing him to add comments to his complaints in next activities (screens). To put it simple how to maintain sessions?

Thanks,

Answer 1

You question is pretty specific to your application. How you maintain a session with the server is pretty much up to you, but you can think of it as implementing the relationship between a web browser and a web server.

After your user logs in, the client should receive some kind of token from the server (similar to a cookie). All subsequent requests will pass along that token to authorize the user, so you’ll have to persist it on the device. Your server will have a mapping of tokens to users.

I would recommend looking into OAUTH2 and maybe taking a look at some well used APIs like Twitter and Foursquare for some ideas about best practices.