Android App Creation Problem - Java

Question

I need to ask a number of questions, for a problem that was imposed on me, regarding the creation of an Android application in Java.

To describe the circumstances, I am creating an app to serve my high school football league. The whole "functional" part is created. This app was designed to serve two parts: the teachers responsible for the administration of the league who point out all the information and coordinate everything, and the students who access this information, namely the rating, markers, results etc... With the "functional" part, I mean the application for teachers, where Maps are created with information from the entire league. That part works quite well and everything is stored in several text files, on the responsible person’s mobile phone.

Then I ended up creating a simple copy of the teachers' application, already more presentable, but only read the text files, being directed to the students. The first question is: Was this a good option, or could have done otherwise the application for students?

Now the problem is this: How can I spread the application, specifically the text files where the information is stored? Given that I will have to support 200/300 students, what is the easiest way for text files, created from the teachers' mobile phone, to reach the students' devices? This is my big problem, since I’ve never done anything like this with these dimensions.

I’d really appreciate it if you could get some advice, any ideas.

Answer 1

The right and elegant way would be to create a webservice and put it in the cloud. And so, the students' and teachers' versions could access the information persisted in a database. There are some free cloud services like Heroku and Openshift. You could create a web service Soap or web service Rest, basically the difference between them is that the web service Soap uses only xml for information exchange, while the web service Rest uses xml, json and other types.