The Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A) and the new SL4A Tablet Remix have a lot of powerful features and interestingly can be used to consume data from a variety of sources both online and offline. The ability to work with some data sources, such as simple relational databases is built in, but thanks to the ability to add additional code libraries to this environment we also get the opportunity to work with non-relational databases and even Linked Data. In this article I will quickly show you how to work with three different types of data source using Python in SL4A: a relational database in the form of a SQLite file, a non-relational database in the form of CouchDB and Linked Data generated from Wikipedia which we will interrogate using the SPARQL language.
databases
Like most developers I spend a lot of time keeping my skills up to date as new technologies and demands emerge. Recently I have been learning a bit about non-relational databases, specifically CouchDB, to understand what this approach means and how it might be useful. I still have a lot to learn about this technology, but thought it might be interesting to share and reflect on what I have learnt so far. In this post I will attempt to introduce CouchDB, how you use it and some of the concepts involved. I won't be able to show the full capabilities of CouchDB in one post so a lot will be missed out, including some of its more powerful features such as replication, but hopefully it will be a start.