Question

I have worked with web services before from the client side on Android, but now I am looking to build my own web service, and I want to find the best solution for working with Android before I start hacking away. I want the output format to be JSON, as I think it will be faster and perhaps a little easier than SAX. So, in what language would it be the easiest and most direct (in everybody’s opinion) to pull this off? I don’t care which language it ends up being, so long as it is the fastest, easiest, and most efficient way to connect with my Android app. I could pull it off in PHP but I am not sure it that is the rout I want to take just yet. Just looking to get some opinions before I start.

Answer 1

This question is really really broad. But I’ll take a crack at it. Your options are:

1. PHP – Really simple and light. Almost every hosting company has this option. You can use codeigniter or something similar to create json output views.
2. Ruby/Rails – Don’t know this too much.
3. Java/J2EE – Might be your best option because you can share classes. For example if you have Person.java and use a lib to create the JSON, then you can use the same class to read a new Person. I suggest using these libraries
   • Jackson for parsing and reading JSON
   • Maven for quickly making a war file
   • Spring or some other REST api to create RESTful services.