Hello,
I'm looking for opinions regarding an approach that I'm contemplating in order to initialize my app. So here is the situation.
I have an application that has multiple modules. There are module specific data as well as application data that are shared between the modules. I'm currently sending all data through RESTful web services using JSON in the response of the web services. Everything works fine and the web services deal with iterating through large number of records. The application also provides the user with visual indicator that data is being downloaded. From a technical perspective, everything functions as expected.
The number of modules in the app keeps growing and is expected to keep growing. Naturally, that means more data to transfer over to the app. As you can probably see, the time required to initialize the app is continuously growing. This is the problem I'm trying to solve.
I have done some analysis to see the size of the sqlite database file that is created in the app and I find the file size to be small (Under 15MB).
My concern is the time that the app requires to download the data. Currently, the end result is a 15MB sqlite file, but the download takes many minutes because there are multiple requests for multiple web services creating the JSON data which is sent to the app, parsed and inserted to the sqlite database. I'm also sure that a 15MB file can be downloaded in seconds. So, as you might have guessed, I'm contemplating having a single web service, that populates the sqlite file on the server and send it back to the app.
Does anybody have any opinion/concerns regarding that approach? Any pros and/or cons to this approach? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Majdi Jaqaman