Using OkHttp and Retrofit for networking
In this section, we will look at how we can use the Retrofit library to perform networking operations and the benefits it provides.
Many Android applications require the internet to access data stored on various servers. Often, this is done through the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) protocol in which data is exchanged between the applications and the servers. The data is often represented in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. In the past, these types of exchanges were implemented either with HttpURLConnection or Apache HttpClient. Working with either of these components meant that developers would need to manually handle the conversion from plain old Java objects (POJOs) to JSON, handle various network configurations, and deal with backward compatibility.
The OkHttp library will address some of these issues through an OkHttpClient class that will handle various network configurations and that provides other features such as...
