We Keep Coding

Android connecting to Java Server

I'm new in android studio I'd like to know how can I make requests to a server.
I wanted that in my Android App I sign up an account and my server stores all the users, something simple just to start. The next step that i want is like passing some strings or objects to other users.
How can I do that?
Is recommended to do my Server in Java/Python?
Thank you

I would suggest you first google your queries, since there are many such repositories on GitHub.
First Link when I searched Android CRUD was this
https://github.com/budasuyasa/simple-android-crud
As for Java or Python, all depends on your skill set, what I would recommend is using Spring boot for backend services but you can also use Flask to create Rest services in Python.
Have fun coding

Create Small Database in Android for Remote Access by Multiple Users

New to android programming and want to save basic student information in a database. What is the easiest and simplest way to store this data so it can be accessed by multiple devices remotely at any time? I know that android supports sqlite but this seems to be only locally on one device. Any ideas or suggestions?Eventually want to publish application on google play and want users to be able to see students names in their class for each class.

If you're not interested in setting up and maintaining a remote server, Firebase is fast, free to get started, and operates in realtime:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/

It seems you've answered your own question :) Place your relational database, such as MySQL, on a remote server. Create an API that performs CRUD operations on the database tables.
Then issue requests to the API in your android app: https://developer.android.com/training/volley/index.html

Yea you basically answered your own, I highly recommend using retrofit2 for android for http requests.You’ll use annotations to describe HTTP requests, URL parameter replacement and query parameter support is integrated by default. Additionally, it provides functionality for custom headers, multipart request body, file uploads and downloads, mocking responses and much more.
Here is great link to get started on your way to happy life:)
Ideally you would want to create your server to handle request and give responses, and android client for those request, if you are going the custom route you probably want a node.js server, or php server. You can even use socket.io to spice things up for real time communication, or maybe some notification system from firebase. Firebase is awesome, it handle all the aforementioned.
For the database portion if you decide not to use Firebase, please do not Raw SQLite you will have nightmares, use something like Realm it is NoSQL ,fast and easy to perform database transactions.

Dynamic Websites: To frequently add JSON/XML data to the page

Background: I am creating an Android app that will get data from a web page (that will be created by me) and parse it. This data can be in XML or JSON format. I would personally prefer JSON but if there is an easy way to achieve it with XML, I would most certainly use it. The app is a Live Score app. So, my page would have XML or JSON with the current score, the current time and minute by minute commentary.
Progress so far: My app is able to read and parse JSON data using the HttpGet and HttpResponse methods alongwith the JSONObject. My concern however is that I am unable to create a dynamic web page. I tried to create and host a page using Google App Engine and Python. The problem was that everytime I'd make changes to the JSON file, I would need to re-deploy the program from the Google App Engine to ensure that the changes are reflected on the URL. I felt this was relatively time consuming.
My Questions:
1.) Is there any way to host a dynamic web page? Preferably with Eclipse and Java. One that I can add the commentary to, as and when an event occurs and it is reflected on the page.
2.) I am not good with Web Services but would GET and POST be a better alternative as opposed to deploying my JSON file with the GAE? If so, how can I go about with that?
3.) Is GCM a good alternative for all this? I tried reading up some of the documentation but it seemed really complex to me.
Thanks.

Sure, it's called AJAX. It requires client-side (browser) javascript code making a request and server-side java code making a response. See: How to use Servlets and Ajax?
Yes, you should use POST and GET to create/retrieve data on server. Your server-side java code should receive data on POST, save it to datastore, and then serve it back on GET. I'd suggest using objectify library for storing data, and GSON for converting java objects to JSON.
GCM is an asynchronous way to notify Android apps (aka notifications) when apps are not running. While with GCM it's possible to send data both ways, it's more complex then plain POST/GET and also only works on Android devices with Google Play.

Making a web service in PHP to give information to Java

Following my question regarding connecting to a MySQL database in Java, I am looking to create a web service in PHP. My Java program needs to ask the web service to gather some data from MySQL database and send the result back. However, I have a few dilema's:
Firstly, my web hosts do not support Java, and therefore the server side needs to be written in PHP but the client needs to be written in Java.
Secondly, all the tutorials I have found seem to involve creating a whole web service project in order for my Java program to communicate with the web service, where as realistically only a couple of classes need to contact the PHP web service.
And, you may have already guessed but I don't know anything about web service's. It was just suggested that I used one in order to get around the GPL licence of the JDBC driver...
I realise that similar questions may have been asked here before but as I am a complete novice, the posts that are saw here did not contain enough information for me and I require as much help as I can get - almost a step by step guide!
Alternatively, I did think about just using standard PHP Sockets, as I am pretty sure I know how to use them. However, I don't know how secure they are and I didn't want to take any risks because I will be needing to retrieve information such as licence keys!
Thanks in Advance

You don't need to use PHP Sockets, all you need is a simple PHP script on your web host that fetches the data you need from the MySQL DB and outputs the data to be read by your Java client.
Your PHP script will need:
To retrieve any query parameters from the Java client (probably
via $_POST or $_GET).
Information to connect to MySQL (hostname/ip address, db name,
username, password).
To run SQL query/queries to grab the data from the database.
To output the data for the java client to read, in some mutually-acceptable format, such as XML, JSON, HTML, etc.
You would structure the script something like this:
<?php
// 1. Read and validate input parameters
$myquery_val = $_POST['queryval'];
// 2. Connect to MySQL
// 3. Fetch MySQL data
// 4. Output data
?>
To learn how to connect to MySQL and retrieve data, read up on MySQL PDO: http://php.net/manual/en/ref.pdo-mysql.php

What I would do is use an agnostic form of communication between your PHP service and the Java client. My weapon of choice is XML.
The steps would be:
Create the PHP classes which will interact with your database and get the data you want to work with. GitHub has plenty of examples and source code. Sample PHP-MySQL Database Abstraction Layer
Create a RESTful php service which takes the data from step 1 and makes it into an XML REST service. Checkout the Recess Framework, an easy to use REST framework
Create your JAVA client, it should just need to be able to work with HTTP, and consume XML. No need for a huge soap or other framework.

Wish to create desktop app that combines facebook and email accounts all in one go - stuck at the first hurdle?

first poster :)
As the title says, I am looking to create a desktop app which will notify me of changes on facebook and new emails, and the facebook part (the first part I've tried) is baffling me. I've never worked with an api before, and have no idea how to integrate facebook's api with this desktop helper I want to create. I will be using java to create this desktop helper.
Thanks in advance!

Here are few pointers for you to get started. Please feel free to ask for clarifications and I will edit my answer accordingly:
For facebook, you can actually pull all those info via their API. There are a lot of types for API, but Facebook specifically use REST API over http.
To simplify, think of it as making an http call with specific parameters and you will be getting an output back.
In order to use facebook API you need to understand their protocol including authentication/login and how to request for things that you want. This would require some reading to their documentation which is pretty complete and available at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/.
For the description of their API URL and the input/output documentation, you could directly jump to Graph API Documentation http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/.
In order to call their API via HTTP from Java, you could leverage HttpClient library from Apache Http Components project http://hc.apache.org/. They have plenty of tutorial and examples for how to make http call using HttpClient
For combining with all other emails accounts (per your question), you need to deal with SMTP or IMAP (whichever email protocol that you are planning to combine with Facebook). This is already built-in to Java via their Java Mail API collection
You then can poll this data on interval basis to get an update from Facebook and your mails
Once you have figured out how to get the data, the rest is just following a good MVC framework. That means separating out your presentation, data and controller (application logic). Make sure that you are separating the classes for #1 and #2 and each of them put their data to normalized data format that then get feed to your View (presentation layer)