I have an Android application in the market which connects and send POST and GET queries to a REST API, and then stores the results in a DB which are then queries and displayed in an appropriate manner in the application.
I’m interested in speeding up the application and have noticed quite a lot of lag between the time of receiving the data back from the api and the data being ready to use. I’d like to investigate if and how I can write similar code in c++ using the NDK to connect to the REST API, process the results and store in a DB or raise an error. I’ve no previous c++ experience and need to know firstly if I can access the same DB in the C++ as the Java, secondly if there are any other caveats which I should be aware of?
Also I guess I should ask – is it worth doing this? Will I notice any difference?
Any links to similar code, or an overview of where I should look to get started in c++ would be greatly appreciated.
I’m doing the EXACT same thing, and trust me: if you have no previous C++ experience, this might be a bit too costly for little benefit.
In my case, after some profiling, I reordered things around and had an initial jump in performance only by dropping DOM and using SAX. All the rest is only making things marginally better, like processing the response while packets are still being transmitted (i.e. not wait for the full response to start processing), and multiplexing requests on the same thread instead of starting a new thread for each.
What you should be looking for in Google is POSIX sockets, HTTP and REST codes, if you wish to do it all by hand. A better option might be using CURL or something similar for the Socket/HTTP part. I did it all myself, but only because I have already done this a few times.