I keep receiving so many requests for an article on how to access MySQL database from Android application. Even though Android applications can have direct access to MySQL database server, that is not preferred due to security issues and high complexity. The easy and best solution is developing a REST web service to receive the requests from whatever the client (including Android applications) and execute them on the database connected with the web service.
There are so many articles already available on the Internet about how to create a web service to perform Create, Read, Update & Delete (CRUD) operations on a database and how to connect from an Android client. However, I wondered why most of them are using PHP to develop the web service! I believe developers find PHP a less painful language to develop web services than Java. In this article, I am going to show how to develop a RESTful CRUD Web service with Java in minutes. As a matured language Java has enough frameworks to make your task easy. I guarantee that you will never look back for a different language once you know the tools.
Prerequisite:
- Eclipse IDE for Java EE or any Java IDE with Apache Maven support. (I recommend IntelliJ IDEA)
- MySQL 5.x
- PhpMyAdmin or any other clients to access MySQL database
- Postman or any other REST Clients