Where we are

For the past few weeks we are trying to improve the functionalities of our system, so let's take a look at what have we done:

• We switched the exchange data format used for serializing from XML to JSON(GSON).
• Improve the CRUD functions, user can add more than one entry to database when he calls the POST method.
• We solve the problem of generating an unique identifier for an entry with Universally Unique Identifier.
• To assure that the database is consistent we added Transactions so each operation in the process of a transaction is guarantee to be atomic, which means that transactions are never partially applied. Either all of the operations in the transaction are applied, or none of them.

Now I will describe next tasks:

1. Authentication with Google accounts -  This kind of authentication is needed in order to use C2DM protocol (I will describe in a later post this feature) and to distinguish data between clients.
2. Delta Updates - In order to optimize the network traffic and save time I will focus on implementing Delta updates. This is an update that only requires the user to download the data that has changed, not the whole database. Any application ready for updating can be updated almost immediately due to this system. If, for example, a local database that is 100 megabytes is updated with a new amount of data that is 2 megabytes, the system will download only the 2 megabytes instead of 102 me gabytes.

In order to keep track of changes during development and testing phase we decided to create a repository. We have created a SVN based repository on Google Code.