App that uses information from external site

Call Me Jimmy

Hi guys. As a mini-project for myself in learning basic mobile app development I'm going to do something that relies on information from another website and I have a couple of questions about it.

The first is technical and a matter of opinion but I have used selenium before and I was thinking of using it under-the-hood, not in a test suite but in the actual code. The main thing the application will be doing logically is going to the website with information and retrieving results and besides possible speed issues I can't see any reason why not to use selenium for this kind of task.

Secondly, and kinda related to performance. I was wondering what people expect from applications that may need to access the internet from time to time. I know I wouldn't particularly like an application that uses my credit on internet access in the background, however I am a poor student. I think the end-users would be roughly my demographic as well so it's something I'll have to consider. I don't use my phone for much other than the calls and texts myself so I'm not sure of the standards regarding internet access by apps. Would it be acceptable just to have some form of notification (not legal) at the start saying "this application will use the internet a couple of times an hour blah blah blah"?

And finally (thank you if you are still reading!), am I right in assuming that once something is free (and/or possibly opensource), using logos/branding imagery from another site is fine?
If I have a helpful travel app that is related to say dublin bus that is free, it's ok to have the dublin bus logo etc?

Thanks for reading and I'd appreciate any advice or information on any of these points.

Atomic Pineapple

I'm not really sure why you want to use selenium in a mobile application? I don't see what you hope to gain from it? To me it looks like it would be just adding an additional layer of complexity.

Keep it simple, write a PHP script (or similar scripting language) to scrape the data you need and turn it into a JSON feed and get the application to download this and parse the JSON.

What operating system are you targeting? It sounds like Android? If so then yes there may be a lot of people with budget smartphones who use credit but even pay as you go type contracts now offer data bundles so I wouldn't worry about letting the user know that your app will be using data, its expected. If you want just put an option in your settings allowing the user turn off back ground data and then only fetch the data when the user manually asks for it.

On logos and branding, no you cannot use these even if your application is free, these are copyright material and you cannot use them at all without the express permission of the owner.

Call Me Jimmy

draffodx wrote: »

I'm not really sure why you want to use selenium in a mobile application? I don't see what you hope to gain from it? To me it looks like it would be just adding an additional layer of complexity.

Keep it simple, write a PHP script (or similar scripting language) to scrape the data you need and turn it into a JSON feed and get the application to download this and parse the JSON.

What operating system are you targeting? It sounds like Android? If so then yes there may be a lot of people with budget smartphones who use credit but even pay as you go type contracts now offer data bundles so I wouldn't worry about letting the user know that your app will be using data, its expected. If you want just put an option in your settings allowing the user turn off back ground data and then only fetch the data when the user manually asks for it.

On logos and branding, no you cannot use these even if your application is free, these are copyright material and you cannot use them at all without the express permission of the owner.

Yea I realised I mightn't have thought the selenium through. I'll probably go with your suggestion of a PHP script and JSON.

I'm target just android at the moment.

Thanks for all the info, so I could theoretically ask the company can I use their logos in the app, however unlikely that is.

Atomic Pineapple

Call Me Jimmy wrote: »

Yea I realised I mightn't have thought the selenium through. I'll probably go with your suggestion of a PHP script and JSON.

I'm target just android at the moment.

Thanks for all the info, so I could theoretically ask the company can I use their logos in the app, however unlikely that is.

If your going with someone like Dublin bus they may even already has a JSON/XML feed of the data you need.

If the website is one that's likely to block your PHP script from scraping then you can use jSoup on Android, it'll mean more data usage and slower parsing as it's done on the device but it won't get blocked. Obviously the PHP script is the way to go but if you do come across problems .

witnessmenow

Its not really a great example of an app in terms of quality (it needs time, that i dont have ), but my checkargos android app does this

The app makes makes get requests to checkargos website (written in PHP). The website goes to argos.ie and parses the information. The website returns the information in JSON format to the application

The code for both are available on my github (links in my sig) android.php is the entry point for the php code.

LuckyLuke123

You could try use JSOUP its a Java HTML Parser and I was testing it a while back to pull Dublin Bus times off it and it seemed to work fine. It should work fine for android as well. I'm not sure how it would work if you wanted to pull images etc off a page but if you know basic HTML it should be a breeze. http://jsoup.org/

witnessmenow

I know this is an old post at this stage, but i thought i would add to it.

If its just grabbing the image url you could do it within the app directly. See the showrss application in my sig (on github) for an example (its a bit of a mess though )