monx663 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Perl, Android web app, AJAX, JSON
by LanX (Saint) on Nov 20, 2017 at 23:30 UTC
    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! :)

    Cheers Rolf
    (addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)
    Je suis Charlie!

[reply]
      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

[reply]
        > 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 ? ? ?

        Cheers Rolf
        (addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)
        Wikisyntax for the Monastery

[reply]
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