Android: Build real weather app: JSON, HTTP and Openweathermap

by Francesco Azzola on June 12th, 2013 | Filed in: Android Core

In this post I want to describe how to create a weather app that gives current weather information. This app will use JSON, HTTP connection and AsyncTask to get this information.. As weather provider I will use OpenWeatherMap a free weather service that provides some interesting API really easy to use.I will guide you through the steps necessary to build up a working app. For more information about API, you can visit the OpenWeatherMap web site. I will show to you the final result so you can have an idea about what we will do in this post.

Current weather info – HTTP Request and JSON Response

OpenWeatherMap offers several API to use to get weather information. We want to use the one that gives us the current weather info. The URL to call to get this info is:

1	http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=city,country

Let’s suppose we want to know the weather in Rome, IT. Using our browser we can have:

As we can see we have JSON response. Formatting the response we have

01

{

02	"coord":{"lon":12.4958,"lat":41.903},

03	"sys":{"country":"Italy","sunrise":1369107818,"sunset":1369160979},

04	"weather":[{

05	"id":802,"main":"Clouds","description":"scattered clouds",

06	"icon":"03d"}],

07	"base":"global stations",

08

"main":{

09	"temp":290.38,

10	"humidity":68,

11	"pressure":1015,

12	"temp_min":287.04,

13	"temp_max":293.71},

14

"wind":{

15	"speed":1.75,

16	"deg":290.002},

17	"clouds":{"all":32},

18	"dt":1369122932,

19	"id":3169070,

20	"name":"Rome",

21

"cod":200

22

}

So the first thing we need to do is creating our data model so that we can parse the response and convert it into Java classes. Analyzing the response we have different “main” tags that we can use as class in Java:

• coord (object)
• sys (object)
• weather (array)
• main (object)
• wind (object)
• name: (String)

The response is quite simple and we can convert it manually. The UML class diagram for the model is shown below: