Re: [android-developers] Re: Poll: how many of you use a backend service or roll your own

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 11:46 AM, Kristopher Micinski
<krismicinski@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Right, right.  I don't think that this is extremely Android specific,
> but I think that Android apps are much more likely to do restful
> communication with a backend than standard apps.  Maybe this hasn't
> been your experience, but it's been mine.  (And that could just be
> because of the types of apps I write.)  Thanks for your input, though,
> I do suspect that major apps all roll their own.
>

Far from being major, but I use my own, running on App Engine.
Not really a problem, just some extra work. Authentication can
be tricky though, if you don't want to use Google accounts
(which is easy, but a lot of people freak out when they see
account related permissions on an app). If you only wanted to
store files/unstructured data, using the Google Cloud storage
(Google's S3) would probably be the easiest solution, no need
for a dedicated frontend.

Amazon makes it fairly easy to use their services (S3, DynamoDB,
etc), but you need to running a server just to get authentication tokens
(Token Vending Machine), which is a pain (and potentially expensive).
For example, you can store data directly in their DynamoDB, without
needing to roll your own REST frontend:

http://aws.amazon.com/articles/7439603059327617

TVM:
http://aws.amazon.com/articles/4611615499399490

And then there is https://www.parse.com/ which reportedly takes
care of all this stuff for you, but I haven't actually used it.

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