Question

I’m trying to learn android and for my app i have few questions.

1. If i type a computer name on the EditText in my android phone, I
   should be able to ping the device (So basically i need to first
   resolve the ARP to get the mac address of the device which I want to
   ping and then send the ping as an ICMP request).

   I believe there is some command to retrieve the computer name and
   send this ping command, but i would like to do it the hard way so
   that i can learn stuffs better – It would be nice if you can show me
   some pointers to some tutorial apps and open source code which does
   similar tasks.

2. Once I have identified and connected to the device. I should be able
   to start a chat with the device.

   Assume the second device is also an android device, how can I
   establish basic message sending from one android device to another.

Basically my app will be a client and server (I guess 2 services – service listening to sockets for incoming messages and client can send out messages).

Does anyone know any sample app / tutorials [basically code examples] which does this in android.

Answer 1

To Nr.1

I’m not quite sure why you first need to ping the device, as you could simply try to connect to the given device (using a timeout) and see if it can be connected.

I found some informations on this, here.

To Nr.2

So, if you want your Devices to communicate to each other, you’ll want to use Sockets.

But, if your App is only for chatting and you don’t need to know if the last send package was successfully send, you could also use UDP instead of TCP (So you don’t need your application to run both the Server and the Client-Socket).

Although, all your questions could have been answered by doing a little googleing…