Connect android to database

I am doing a school project where we need to create an android application which needs to connect to a database. the application needs to gain and store information for people's profiles on the database. But unfortunatly we are a little b开发者_运维百科it stuck at this point because there are numerous ways to link the application such as http request through apache or through the SOAP/REST protocol.

But it's really hard to find good instructions or tutorials on the problem since I can't really find them. Maybe that's cause i'm probably using the wrong words on google. Unfortunately I have little relevant information. So if anyone can help me with finding relevant links to good online tutorials or howto's than those are very welcome.

I'd recommend using REST and JSON to communicate to a PHP script running on Apache. Don't worry about the database on the Android side of things, just focus on what kinds of queries you might need to make and what data you need returned. Then put together a PHP script to take those queries and generate the necessary SQL to query the database on the server. For example, You need look look up a person by name and show their address in your Android app. A REST Query is just a simple HTTP GET to request data. For example, to look up John Smith, you might request: http://www.example.org/lookup.php?name=John+Smith which will return a short JSON snippet generated by PHP:

{
    name: "John Smith",
    address: "1234 N Elm St.",
    city: "New York",
    state: "New York"
}

You can instruct PHP to use the content type text/plain by putting this at the top of your PHP script:

Then you can just navigate to the above URL in your browser and see your JSON response printed out nicely as a page. There should be a good JSON parser written in Java out there you can use with Android. Hopefully, this will get you started.

This tutorial really helped me: http://www.screaming-penguin.com/node/7742