Chapter 3. Creating and Accessing Content from the Cloud

In this chapter, we will learn how to consume content from the Web using our application; this content could be a list of items inside an XML or JSON file (something that we wish to display), retrieved from the Internet. For instance, if we were building an app that shows the current weather conditions, we would need to contact an external API to retrieve all the information needed.

We will create our own cloud database in Parse, a service that allows us to do this really quickly without the hassle of creating and maintaining our own servers. Apart from this, we will populate the database with information to be displayed in MasteringAndroidApp.

We will also cover best practices regarding network requests with Google Volley, using the ultrafast HTTP library, OkHttp, and parsing the requested objects efficiently with Gson. We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Creating your own cloud database
• Consuming content from...