13.1. Developing RESTful Android Applications

We are not the only ones who see the benefits of this approach. At the Google I/O conference in May 2010, Virgil Dobjanschi of Google presented a talk that outlined the following three patterns for using content providers to integrate RESTful web services into Android applications:

Activity→Service→ContentProvider

This pattern involves an activity contacting a service to access application data, which in turn delegates to a content provider to access that data. In this scenario, the activity invokes an asynchronous method on a service that performs asynchronous RESTful invocations.

Activity→ContentProvider→Service

An activity contacts a content provider, which in turn delegates to a service to asynchronously load data. This approach allows the activity to use the convenience of the content provider API to interact with data. The content provider invokes methods on the asynchronous service implementation to invoke a RESTful request. This approach capitalizes on the convenient symmetry between the content provider API and RESTful use of HTTP.

Activity→ContentProvider→SyncAdapter

Android sync adapters provide a framework for synchronizing user data between a device and the cloud. Google Contacts uses a sync adapter. In this scenario, an activity uses the content provider API to access data synchronized by a sync adapter.