On PHPMaster.com today they've posted the second part of their series looking at combining a PHP backend and an Android application (by Matt Turland). In the previous article, he helped you set up some of the Android side to be able to reach out to a PHP web service. In this second part he gets into the sending and receiving of messages between the client and server.

Part 1 of this series focused on getting the Android application set up to make an HTTP request. In part 2, we’ll focus on implementing the use of data serialization and compression on the Android and PHP sides of the request.

He has it broken up into the different steps of the process:

• Determining the Data Serialization Format
• Determining the Data Compression Format
• Sending the Response
• Decompressing the Response
• Deserializing the Response

He also includes a section about caching the responses you get back from the server, an important step that can save you (and your users) some headaches and maybe even give a bit of a speed boost.