What is the better way to develop RSS reader for Android bassed on HTTP requests?

Question

I'm new in development of applications for Android so I'm asking those questions for know which is better way to make RSS reader app. I have a server that downloads and stores on database news from Yahoo. On this database are stored title, content, publication date and link of news. Than I'm making HTTP POST to server to download news to Android. Data from server to android are passed in Json.

Can people, who already had developed an application like this, answer my questions?

1. Should I pass all list of news in one response to POST or it's better to make it's better to make several POSTs to get the same list? I'm asking this question because response from server may be too big and I don't know which is a better way to transmit it.

2. Comment system is the feature of my app. So need I to create a authentication system or it's possible to make it basing on ID of phone?

3. Another thing I need to do is to alert user when new news has appeared on server. I don't have idea how to do it with HTTP POST? Need I send to server list of nees that I have on Android?

Thank you for attention.

Answer 1

Here are the answers for your respective wuestions

1) This depends more on kind of UI you chose for your Android application. In my perspective you should go for multi-page (like prev-next links on bottom of screen) UI for your reader. And you should cache the results of previous page as well as next page in you app (so this also means to fetch selective results only) so that when user clicks on next/prev button the responsiveness of you application is good.

2) Ideally you app should ask for show a pop-up dialog asking to authenticate for commenting. You should use something like http://developer.android.com/reference/android/accounts/AccountManager.html to store these credentials so that from next time you do not ask the credentials again once authentication is successful.

3) In this case you should look at http://code.google.com/android/c2dm/ Polling is surely not the way to go :)