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Android

Jeffrey Kwok
Jeffrey Kwok
551 Points
Posted by Jeffrey Kwok
Jeffrey Kwok
551 Points

A question about Java, Android Development, and database

Let's say I wanted to make a "movie" android app. My hypothetical app aggregates movie reviews from rottentomatoes.com and imdb.com. My question is how does one go about obtaining all the data from rottentomatoes and imdb when I'm coding my app? is there a special code that allows me to access data from these two websites? Do I have to pay rottentomatoes or imdb? Is this even remotely possible? I'm completely new to app development. Forgive me naivety lol

1 Answer

Seth Kroger
Seth Kroger
56,413 Points
Seth Kroger
Seth Kroger
56,413 Points

Both those websites very likely have APIs you can use to retrieve data from them. These APIs (Application Programming Interface) provide an interface you can use to access the site's data in various ways through website requests. With the APIs you could access the data as you need to from the app by querying the site without having to store all the data in a database yourself. If you look at the sites' homepage near the bottom, there's usually a link that says "API" or "Developers" that will show you the info you need, and what they require.

Jeffrey Kwok
Jeffrey Kwok
551 Points
Jeffrey Kwok
Jeffrey Kwok
551 Points

I have a followup question. I researched through a few APIs i was interested in and alot of them are in XML and JSON. Is it possible to convert XML/JSON or any other language into java?

Seth Kroger
Seth Kroger
56,413 Points
Seth Kroger
Seth Kroger
56,413 Points

XML and JSON aren't programming languages per se, They're data formats. But there are a number of Java tool kits to read and write XML and JSON, including some built into the Android OS. The Android Track here covers using the built-in JSON library to read data from an API. Others a bit more sophisticated can translate them back and forth from Java objects automatically like Gson and Jackson.