Setting up Parse SDK with Android

So now that Parse.com is gone, there’s still the option of using your own server w/ their open-source server code.

You can find info on setting that up on their site linked above. But this post is about setting up your Android Studio project w/ the Parse SDK.

1. If you don’t have it, get Android Studio: https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html
2. Add Parse: https://github.com/ParsePlatform/Parse-SDK-Android
   1. Downloaded SDK
   2. Put jar file in ‘libs’ dir same level as project ‘java’ dir under src/main
   3. Added Gradle line for jar file to build.gradle (for app module, not project):
      1. compile ‘com.parse:parse-android:1.13.1’
3. Restarted project (it wasn’t picking up the SDK)
4. Added imports, init call and login call to test

As you can see, I created a class to house some static methods including initializing the Parse server connection. The ‘initialized’ flag is to prevent it from happening multiple times in a given execution of the app.

Parse.initialize(new Parse.Configuration.Builder(getApplicationContext())
    .applicationId(“<app id>“)
    .clientKey("-----n/a-----")
    .server(“<api url>”)
    .build()
);

I was connecting to an existing database/Parse server so I tested it w/ a quick login…

ParseUser user = ParseUser.logIn(“<username>”, “<password>”); // returns user