Soap Client on Android to access Salesforce APIs

Question

I want to develop an application on the Android platform to connect to salesforce. From what i have found salesforce provides service API's which can be used to connect to salesforce servers by creating a Web service from the client-side application.

Salesforce developer site has examples of creating such a Web service by using Apache Axis as the SOAP client and using the WSDL file downloaded from the salesforce website. I want to know can this be done from the Android platform?

Is there a version of Apache Axis ported for Android? I did some googling and could find that Android does not have an inbuilt SOAP client and usually, Ksoap is used on Android. But I have also read that KSOAP doesn't support WSDL.

I have seen the above question asked before but quite a while ago, As the Android platform has emerged ever since I want to know what is the current situation and options of doing this.

Also, since I am new to Android and development on Android if anyone can direct me to a sample code snippet, which creates a Web Service from android to connect to salesforce, I would be highly grateful.

Thanks in Advance.

Answer 1

So, SOAP is just XML over HTTP, Android (at least 2.1 and up, not sure about earlier versions) have built-in XML parsers and serializers, so you could manually build/parser the relevant soap messages that you care about (this is probably not a big deal if you only need to make a few different types of calls, but will be a chunk of work to do them all). Depending on your timeframe, you could wait for the REST API, which will let you do JSON instead of XML. (this is currently in pilot)

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