Finally, I found some time to write about accessing MySQL or any database that you can think about from an Android application. Android offers a built-in database known as SQLite which is supposed to be used for local data storage. For example, if you want to store your recent transactions locally in the device, you have to go with SQLite. I have already written a few articles on how to use SQLite database in Android. However, enterprise mobile applications often depend on client/server databases such as MySQL, Oracle DB or MongoDB. Whatever the database, you have chosen, the way to access them from an Android application is pretty same. In this article, I explain how to access a MySQL database from an Android application written in Kotlin.
I will use Kotlin for all upcoming Android tutorials because it is the future of Android programming. Kotlin is a JVM based language and you can easily convert a Kotlin project into Java and vice versa.
An Android application is not supposed to directly access a database deployed in a server. I do not recommend implementing JDBC connections in an Android application due to the tight coupling introduced between the application and the database. The industrial best practice requires you to implement a web service between the database and the Android application. Having a web service layer reduces the complexity of the Android application and also reduces the dependency on database specific operations. Therefore, the problem of accessing a client/server database like MySQL from an Android application can be defined as the problem of consuming a web service hosted somewhere.
Having said that, as an Android developer, you don't need to care about what is behind the web service. It may be a MySQL database, MongoDB database, a Social Media network or even a Weather Network API. What you need is the API endpoints exposed by the web service. In this article, I only explain how to connect to a web service hosted on your local machine from an Android application. However, the sample web service used in this article provides API endpoints to CRUD operations on a MySQL database. Please follow the
RESTful CRUD With Java and MySQL in Minutes article and develop the web service to access a MySQL database. In the following section, you will learn how to access the web service you have created for accessing a database.
