Thursday, February 24, 2011

android.jar and KSOAP2

The android.jar file is 11MB!

   Android does not contain any tools to help building SOAP based web service clients.
Google seems to like  REST services. The SDK is not bundled with any SOAP-related tools.
An alternative is to add kSOAP 2 to (Java ME) projects ... Or better we can use ksoap2 for android

   If an Android Activity access the internet via HTTP connection
the following line must be added to  AndroidManifest.xml :


http://romenlaw.blogspot.com/search/label/Web%20Service
http://romenlaw.blogspot.com/2008/08/consuming-web-services-from-android.html
http://www.android10.org/index.php/articleslibraries/167-using-ksoap2-for-android-soap-web-service


In general the Android API is very complete and offeres support for a whole lot of features and task. I did however have to find out that SOAP support is generally non existant. Given the widely known problems with SOAP and the trend towards simpler REST based services and the young age of the Android platform this is not too surprising. However in reality many people still need to work with legacy SOAP services.

http://www.simpligility.com/2010/05/attribute-support-for-ksoap2-on-android/

When you research on the web for SOAP support libraries on embedded devices including Android
you end up running into KSOAP and KSOAP2.
KSOAP2 library is used on J2ME devices like RIM Blackberry, and now Android.

On Android  KSOAP2 is alive :
http://code.google.com/p/ksoap2-android/updates/list

Unfortunately everything around KSOAP for JavaME seems to be rather old and inactive.
The project has a few issues assigned and had no activity for a while.

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