How do Mobile Apps communicate with a server? Does this communication happen over HTTP or are there other methods (for instance, I guess a mobile app could open a socket)? Does this differ form device to device? Is there one most commonly used approach? If the communication happens over HTTP how do the URLs look like? Is there a way to identify the app based on the the "User Agent" in the HTTP request if the communication is happening over HTTP?
Mobile Apps can communicate with a server in many ways. Mobile apps can also use other features of the mobile. For instance SMS , MMS. Its pretty open really. Your question could be "how do computers communicate with a server?".
A mobile app can be a simple as loading a web page. This would be http.
The problem with mobile apps. They run on phones. There are lots of different phone manufacturers and its up to them (in some case the mobile phone operators also have weight) what to allow the programmer to do by the choice of operating system.
If you are getting started with mobile apps. Take a look at android its pretty simple to get going with if you know a little about programming.
As for the useragent. It depends but usually if you are using the http api on the phone, you can set the user agent to what ever you want it to be, its just a string.
Hope this helps!
Communication usually happens over http. Applications usually identify themselves in the User Agent field
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I am working on Mobile Testing of Web Application. I have done real-time performance measurement in chrome browser using JMeter and Web Driver sampler.
Now, I want to do the same in real mobile devices.
For example, if 10 users need to log in, I want to simulate it in multiple mobile devices. Kindly suggest me the best way to do the mobile performance testing.
Since I am working on a web application, it mostly involves in Chrome browser and gmail app's default browser.
If you want to simulate multiple users concurrently accessing your application backend the best way would be going for JMeter's HTTP Request samplers as real browsers are very resource intensive.
Record your mobile device network activity using JMeter's HTTP(S) Test Script Recorder, check out Load Testing Mobile Apps Made Easy guide for instructions.
If your goal is to simulate different devices you can configure relevant User-Agent header in the HTTP Header Manager
Set up as many threads as needed in Thread Group
Run your test and analyze results
I'm working on an AngularJS mobile web app and am getting ready to deploy to Firebase Hosting. Does anyone know how to ensure that only devices can install the web app and prevent desktop browsers from viewing? I'm trying to protect the client's intellectual property as well as my own by making a reasonable attempt to disallow the source code from being read. Thank you!!
It's not possible to prevent the reverse engineering of any web application.
Developing a mobile application using native code may make you feel more secure about the intellectual property, however once a would be attacker gets the software on to their own hardware they will have the opportunity to defeat your software.
I wound up using ng-device-detector to determine whether the user was using a mobile device or not, and delivering a different template page depending. This library contains an isMobile() function that works great.
I am creating an app that involves sending and receiving settings... The desktop application is constantly sending information to a hosted MySQL database, and the Android app will query this same information. It is something similar to the whatsapp web (but in this case, I'll be using a desktop app instead of webpages).
Until this part, everything is working as I need... but, this same Android app will be used to send settings to the desktop app, and the desktop will read and change its settings according to what was just sent.
If I need to constantly query the hosted MySQL database and check if there is any kind of changes sent from the Android, I believe that I'll have a performance drop... each time a query loop is finished, I would have to query, check for any modifications and so on.
Is there a better or correct way to do this kind integration between two apps? I've read something about WebSockets, but I don't have much technical information about this, neither examples that I can use in this case.
Thank you very much for your knowledge sharing.
Here are some useful sites on WebSocket:
http://websocket.org
http://blog.kaazing.com/ [some useful blog posts]
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/websockets/basics/
https://goo.gl/5OaJff [mozilla site]
You may want to consider the Observer/Observables pattern. The MYSQL is the Observable and your desktop app and Android app are Observers (and you can add other Observers in the future). Its a common pattern with lots of examples out there. But you'll need a centralized WebSocket server and an Observer/Observable coordination subsystem. You can setup a pub/sub message broker that uses WebSocket with a nice JMS, MQTT, etc, API to make your life easier. ActiveMQ, IBM MQ Lite, Kaazing JMS Edition... lots of options.
full disclosure. I work for Kaazing.
Right now ,i and my friend looking forward to make a mobile application, which is going to get data from several different sources, analyze it with some kind of algorythm and make the best decision on that. The main problem is - right architecture for that. We consider that mobile application is going to be just a client, representing data placed somewhere on internet (anyway internet is required).
Can u help us with making right choice?
We have some kind of knowledge about client-server architecture with sockets... But this is definetly not we need in this particular situation.
Our thought is to make a web site which is going to generate all the required data.After that implement mobile apps which will represent info from website, using convenient interface. Is it right way?
Yes, that's the way to go.
Now, you have several options within that architecture...
server gets data from several different sources
server might expose some kind of RESTful API to the client apps
clients can be native mobile applications or client might be html5 mobile apps
depending on the nature of the data, you might want to consider some kinds of caching data that you get from 3rd party services/sources
EDIT:
I use ASP WebApi to build REST Api that serves json data to android mobile app.
So, my infrastructure is:
- MS SQL 2012
- ASP MVC 4, WebAPI
- android mobiles (we're targeting mainly Jelly Bean & Kit Kat)
I've built n-layered application with layers (bottom up order):
- DAL (i don't use any ORM framework...i use my own repository that runs stored procedures on SQL server)
Repository that wraps around db DAL and a few Service Agents that gets data from 3rd party services we use
Business layer where i do our business operations
Service layer (for now, it has no special use but afterwards i might need it as my business layer will be consumed from a few clients: WebAPI, web site, windows service...)
WebAPI for REST where mobile client requests end up
I'm developing a web based application built on codeigniter which will also have a mobile application(blackberry, iphone, android etc.). The web application will be connecting to a (mysql) database to store/retrieve/update data. I would like to know what would be the best solution for having a mobile application store/retrieve/update data.
Taking into consideration performance, flexibility, Security
Look at your device no different than if it was a browser. The are both clients. All devices (well at least Android and iOS) provide you with ways to make xhr requests, just like your browser does. So you need an API on your server that your device will use to get the data. Note that if your application does not already have an API, you will need to develop one.