Switch to Creating An App - Progress and Problems

I have switched from constructing my Linux server to building an Android application for the school.

This app will be designed to retrieve daily-updated information from a server. The problem I'm having with this, is when I try to access testing info through the school's WiFi on the app from my server at home, it seems it will sometimes access a cached version (since it is retrieving a .txt file through a URL). I assume this is because all non-school devices on the WiFi go to the 'guest' network, which I'd think receives all the bandwidth that isn't being currently used (i.e. the guest devices get a lower priority than the school's devices), so when there's not enough to be able to connect to that URL for updates, it just accesses the cached version instead.

If this is what the problem is, I think my best solution is to set up the server at the school (as the plan was anyways) and have the app recognize when it is connected to the school's network, and if it is, connect to the server for updates through LAN instead of internet to (hopefully) avoid the caching problem.

After I solve this problem, I have to remake the interface to use a fragments system, which will allow a lot more design & navigational features, and then start coding the rest of the PHP forms that gets filled out to update the information the app gets from the server.

Progress Update

 

Got LAMP set up along with Webmin and a CMS (e107).

Though I've set these things up before on a different Linux distro, it was still a change since Debian can sometimes work with scripts and packages a little differently than distro's like Ubuntu (e.g. .deb's instead of .tar.gz's), so I learned a good bit more about working around with Debian.

I've been taking time to learn and work a lot more with BASH and Shell scripting. This wasn't for usage in any scenario with my server, but rather another situation with a different one that I help out with. I've learned that in many situations (usually where you require some sort of automation) BASH scripting can be incredibly useful, but also very different compared to how most object-oriented scripting and programming languages can work, so there's a lot more learning and tweaking involved.

In my time playing with BASH scripting, I learned an interesting thing about the way UNIX and Windows handle files with text in them differently, as I was having a weird problem with a script I was working on, and eventually found out that since the file was written on a Windows system, there were auto-added (and deeply hidden) symbols and characters in my scripts. I was able to remove these hidden items and change the formatting using something in Linux called vim.

As I mentioned in a previous post, even though there's not too much to do, there's a massive amount to learn from doing these (sometimes) small things. Just from what I've done so far I've learned a very large amount about servers and networks in general.

My next steps are to start doing more tweaking to my CMS and getting it fully set up, while I try to set up an FTP server (and see if I can actually get Samba to work for once).