Perl, Android web app, AJAX, JSON

[monx663]

Hi all

This is not a 100% Perl question but I am Perl programmer and my question touches on Perl heavily. There is a fully functional web based CMS that is written in Perl for which I would like to make certain functionality available to an Android app being written. The requirements are not that "heavy".

The Android App needs to do the following few things:

* Send a username/password combination to gain access to the CMS backoffice.

* Call certain URLs which will enable the app to get a list of objects (images,names, other table contents) available in the CMS's database.

* Probably POST to certain URLs in order to be able to upload images and create content.

My question is: What methodology/APIs should I be looking at to complete this Perl CMS/Android app "integration". I was thinking of writing an AJAX layer that would expose certain methods to the Android app, which will be calling them via HTTP requests. I was also thinking of modifying certain of the CMS's packages to perhaps implement methods for JSON based communication of textual and binary data (images). I have also heard of Mojolistic, which supposedly is intended for writing RESTful APIs but find this a bit of an overkill for my scenario.

Does anybody want to offer any of his thoughts about which route to pursue?

[LanX]

I've never done it but my approach would be to build the App using HTML5

See this how-to-create-an-android-app-using-html-5 discussion on stack overflow.

Concerning the API to your CMS, all your ideas sound good.

It's hard to tell without deep knowledge of the extendibility of your CMS.

HTH! :)

[monx663]

Hi Rolf and thanks for your input. The mobile app is being built in HTML5 but the various drop-down boxes need to be populated with data from the CMS.

Regarding the extendibility of the CMS it can be thought of as "infinite". :p

The CMS was written by myself and weights more than 1Mb of object oriented Perl code, with certain modules already exposing web methods that accept POSTs/GETs, provided that the POST/GET request is accompanied by the authentication session cookie.

My question was, shall I write the API using AJAX or only stick with JSON for the data interchange?

Cheers,

Konstantinos

[LanX]

> My question was, shall I write the API using AJAX or only stick with JSON for the data interchange?

This is not an XOR question, a XMLHttpRequest can perfectly interact with REST and process JSON and/or XML.

What do you mean with AJAX ? ? ?