Rich Freedman

Android Advanced Cursors

If you have been doing Android development for even a little while, you have probably used the provided SQLite functionality to store and retrieve data in a local database on the Android device. If not, you can head over to Lars Vogel’s excellent tutorial website to see how it all works, or to get a refresher. For … Read More

HTTPS with Client Certificates on Android

Many Android applications use REST or another HTTP based protocol to communicate with a server. Working with HTTP and HTTPS on Android is generally fairly straightforward and well documented. Depending on the version of the Android OS, either HTTPClient or HttpURLConnection “just work”. Either one can be used, but the official recommendation is to use … Read More

Full-Text Search For Relational Data

Thanks to internet search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, everyone has become accustomed to searching their data effortlessly. Consequently, as developers of web-based applications, we increasingly find that our customers’ requirements include being able to search their application’s data in a “Google-like” way. For a very small subset of applications that only need to … Read More

Web Application Security

The recent news that the popular dating site Plenty Of Fish was hacked and that passwords and other user information was stolen truly disheartened me. It was just the latest in a seemingly endless list of such hacks over the years, recently including Gawker Media (Lifehacker, Gizmodo), McDonald’s, Walgreen’s and Pizza Hut. Apparently, Little Bobby … Read More

Build and Release Management With Apache Maven

More than ten years ago, Joel Spolsky of “Joel on Software” fame wrote The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code. It was a great set of 12 yes/no questions, all of which you should be able to honestly answer “yes” if your team is to have any hope of producing good software in a … Read More