Development tips for Google Cloud Endpoints for Android

You’ve been struck with an idea for the perfect idea for a mobile game on Android, and you’re sure it will be a hit. The details are a little fuzzy, but it definitely has something to do with cats. But, being an experienced engineer, you know how much work needs to go into creating and maintaining a scalable backend. You’re going to need servers, and then you’ll have to load-balance them. And you’re going to need to write protocols to enable your multiple servers to communicate with your mobile clients. So much work, and all you really want to do is create attractive content.



How about using Google Cloud Endpoints, a service for building and exposing your custom APIs? You can create a new App Engine backend for your project with a single command and generate a client library from your API with another. Cloud Endpoints is easy to use and enables flexible and agile development, which is important (because remember, so far your idea consists of just “cats”).



One of the benefits of being able to easily build your own API is that you can design it any way you want. Cloud Endpoints gives you this flexibility—it allows REST- or RPC-style APIs, or a combination of both. Even better, you can change the design as often as you like and implement those changes quickly.



To help you get started, we have published a new article about Google Cloud Endpoints for Android to complement the developer docs in Java and Python. The article walks you through the development process and answers many common questions. For example, what is representational state transfer, anyway? Which combinations of Endpoint class notations should you use? How do you support enums in your API?



This paper is a useful -- and occasionally entertaining -- addendum to aid you in navigating Google Cloud Endpoints. It features some programming gems that you won’t want to miss, such as “lobster.dance();”.



Good luck, have fun! We look forward to playing your mobile cat game.



- Posted by Helen T Chou, Solutions Application Engineer