MAP524/DPS924 Lecture 7

There are many reasons to connect to a server from your application - most often you'll want to retrieve content from the web to display and manipulate in your app.

You'll need to use an HttpURLConnection.

Any network operation can potentially take a very long time, so you'll have to do all your network stuff in a separate thread or AsyncTask.

Your app will get fewer bad reviews if it displays a good error message when a network is not available. See here for a simple example of how to check the status of your connectivity.

If your app does large downloads (megabytes) - you may want to only do those downloads when connected to wifi:

NetworkInfo wifi = cm.getNetworkInfo(ConnectivityManager.TYPE_WIFI);
if (wifi.isConnected())
{
    // do something
}