Using WebSockets to keep a local cache in sync

Introduction

Every now and then you find yourself in a situation were you have to make the most out of the few resources you have available - at least I did!

One of my projects was having considerable performance problems, problems I realised were mainly due to a very slow network - it could take something between 2 to 5 seconds to retrieve 300kb, something that was causing a really sluggish user experience.

Given that the client didn't want to move his server for is current hosting provider, but was complaining all the time of how slow things were, I realised that I had to find a way to improve application responsiveness by having the data already stored locally when the user/UI actually needs it.

So, devised a strategy of keeping a local cache and using web sockets to notify my local cache that local data as dirty and needs to be updated.

Turn on wifi from adb

Today I found myself locked from my own phone: I accidentally tried the wrong pattern to many times and was asked to login to google - unfortunately for me, I had no internet connection, making it impossible to do so (not nice google).

Using images in Spinner with ArrayAdapter

In my experiments with android, I was challenged with creating a rating mechanism for a wine app that would use glasses (images) instead of traditional stars. In this article I will guid you through the process of using images in a spinner, to achieve the intended.

Using Camera in Android

This is a simple how to on how I solved the issue of taking pictures in one application, storing and showing them later.

I found that this simple task was not at all clear for me in the documentation, nor did I found a complete guide to get this task done. I hope if people find the same problem, this article may help them.