6.6. Summary

In this chapter, we started with a brief background of basic networking concepts, from nodes and addresses to layers and protocols. With that general background in place, we covered details about how to obtain network status information and showed several different ways to work with the IP networking capabilities of the platform.

In terms of networking, we looked at using basic sockets and the java.net package. Then we also examined the included Apache HttpClient API. HTTP is one of the most common—and most important—networking resources available to the Android platform. Using HttpClient, we covered a lot of territory in terms of different request types, parameters, headers, authentication, and more. Beyond basic HTTP, we also explored POX and REST, and we discussed a bit of SOAP—all of which use HTTP as the transport mechanism.