Android client/server application?

I am supervising a project done by two students that involves retrieving information from a server and displaying it on an android phone. The students have never learnt networking, sql or java before (although they do know how to program) and are only now learning how to setup socketed connections between the phon开发者_开发问答e and a sample server app that i gave them.

They will need to setup a simple sql database on the server on the campus network and be able to communicate with it and only pull information from the database and display it on the phone.

My current plan is that they will receive xml objects generated on the server side sent as a stream through the socket connection. They will then be able to generate a DOM using javax.xml classes and display it as they see fit on the phone itself.

Is this a valid method? What kind of problems can they expect to experience by following this technique? Is there another/better/correct way to do this (without using php or webservices)? The system will be for multiple users so will there be any significant performance issue with the proposed method?

Note 1: The phone never sends any request other than a single multicharacter identifier. The server interprets this identifier and returns information from preprogrammed queries and places it into an xml format.

Webservices sound like the correct approach for this, since you would not want to directly allow communication to the database over the internet.

The book "Unlocking Android" from Manning Publications, ISBN 978-1-933988-67-2 has a Chapter (6) dedicated to "Networking and web services".

Ah and then there is the one and only very nice video from a presentation regarding Android and RESTful webservices from the Google IO.

Couchbase, although from the NoSQL movement have a nice summary as well.

You could use JSON instead of XML, could be easier to parse and work with (feels more lightweight to me at least).

Sorry, forgot the answer for your search of problems:

• Activity freezing upon freezing requests: Use additional threads for your requests
• How to generally handle high latency
• Handle offline behaviour