Week 15

This week I continued working on the Android randomness collection.

Networking:

First, I wrote a simple server program using Java sockets to accept and print any incoming communication. I then wrote a corresponding client program and ran both on the same machine. After I got this working, I verified that they also worked on separate machines. With this working, I modified the client program for Android and ran it on the Nexus S. This process mainly involved creating a new thread to do the network communication since Android does not allow this from the UI thread. This allowed me to get working communication between the Android phone and a server.

Next, I wrote the final server program. The networking is very similar to the previous program, but I modified the structure to spawn a new thread for every client. I then wrote synchronized methods to separate the messages based on type (wifi, bluetooth, antenna) and write them to files local to the server.

Android Services:

As stated in my previous post, I want to alter my existing Android code to use services so that the user doesn't have to leave the collection app open for it to do its job. Therefore, I did some research on services and the code needed to implement them. I followed instructions I have found online, and have modified the previous bluetooth program to use a service. At present, I am debugging this since the service doesn't ever seem to start. I am confident however, that I will resolve this quickly, and that once I do, the other two parts will be easy to finish.