Mobile App Development: Working with Data

If we aim to create an application centered on user interaction, storing dates, or tracking activities, understanding how to effectively utilize available data is crucial. There are two types: local data, fed by the application itself, and remote data from the server. Recognizing when to use each is key, and in this context, our expertise as a mobile app development company becomes essential in navigating these distinctions and employing appropriate technologies.

The Role of Data in Mobile Application Development

As I mentioned in the entry, we have two possible ways of processing the data: locally or remotely. Before going into their differences, I would like to note the similarities. You must keep in mind that in both cases we depend on a database. That means that, looking at the structure, what we learn on one side we can take advantage of on the other. This is because, generally, the language used is SQL, a standard dedicated to serving databases. Although NoSQL databases exist, I am not going to talk about them today. What we do know is that there is SQLite, the reduced and lightweight (lite) version of SQL. Its objective is to be able to give the power of its older brother to mobile operating systems without gaining weight, but without changing the language of the instructions, because, yes, this is not Microsoft Access, so there is no more dragging tables and names back and forth in a graphical interface. We are programmers, right? Knowing this, it is not absurd to think that it is worth learning to make simple instructions in SQL, in fact it is one of the aspects that I teach in the Appcelerator courses, at the end of topic 7, and part of the syllabus of the final project. I mean, it's important. However, I'm not talking about heavy, hard database work, let's remember that everything is supposed to be very light so that the app does not grow in size and there are problems with installations on memory-constrained terminals. In all the time I have been developing applications, which is not short, I have never had to do very serious tasks with queries, and even though in my academic training they were very tough about it. So don't be afraid of him.

But What about the Differences?

This is where the "fun" comes in. In order to recover data from the server, or send it and have it saved, we must first understand what GET and POST are two methodologies for processing data that exist in the PHP language. I won't go into any particular length, but in summary, if we use English words, GET helps us recover data through the URL, sending certain values ​​that we need, and POST is used to write to the database. This is used by making an HTTP connection, which is the web protocol used to send and receive requests from a server, in which, at the programming level, we will determine how and what data we want to receive. But despite that, the way to retrieve them is thanks to a text string, encoded in a Javascript standard, called JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation. JSON is, basically, your great ally when it comes to sending and receiving data on a phone, since, as I mentioned, it is a text string so its weight is so light that it does not even affect mobile data consumption. contracted with your company. Such is the thing that one day I had to retrieve the same chain for hours using my Yoigo data, and at the end of the day I had only spent 100k. That is a ridiculous amount, both for consumption, storage, use, etc. The virtue of JSON is that it behaves like a data vector (Array), a programming concept that if you don't know, I encourage you to research it because they are incredibly useful, so accessing each section is simple. Thanks to this we can determine in advance how said data is structured to later execute database queries and save it locally. Why locally if we have it available remotely? Good question: the idea is that we only access the server to make sure that there is no change in the data that we need to address, and once we make sure of this, we save it locally and no longer need to download it again. With this, we gain execution time, reduce consumption and optimize the application so that its fluidity is not affected.

Moreover, this serves as a concise overview of the two primary methods for handling data in a mobile application. We'll explore this further in upcoming discussions, as it's a comprehensive and potentially intricate topic, supported by our mobile application development services

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