I have an update on my findings with the latest WordPress for Android 2.1 build. It seems the problem I’m having isn’t a threading issue but rather a problem using SSL from an Android Virtual Device.

I’m sure anyone doing development here that doesn’t have an actual Android device knows about the AVD which comes with the Android development kit. Well this is my primary development environment since I don’t have an Android device handy.

As such, it’s kind of a big problem for SSL not to work when communicating with the WordPress service. I found an article dating back to 2009 which mentions that there was a problem using the WordPress RSD service when using SSL. Apparently this was causing intermittent problems when devices would attempt to discover information about WordPress and it was reported that the service would take upward of 3 minutes or more to respond which was causing the system level timeouts to abort the connection attempt.

Although haven’t discovered the exact location of the problem in the WordPress for Android 2.1 code base it seems like it’s probably around the call “getXMLRPCUrl” in AddAccout which attempts to use RSD to get the proper url. I’ve found that if I just hard code it to use “http://wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php” instead of letting it discover the preferred url, the problem goes away.

Perhaps this is a problem specifically with using the AVD environment and the Eclipse debugger but it’s still too soon for me to say. If anyone has had this problem and has a suggestion on how to work around it without modifying the codebase, please let me know.

Again, patiently awaiting a response.

Thanks in advance!

In evaluating the current product I found that I immediately had a problem trying to add an existing WordPress.com hosted blog to my Android application.

After a couple days of trouble shooting the issue I found one simple fix for it. This obviously is not the fix but it does point to the possible problem. This is a guess at this point but I wanted to get some feedback to see if anyone else is having this problem.

It seems that in the class AddAccount (AddAccount.java) if you try to reference the containing classes private member “client”, the thread XMLRPCMethod always fails to connect to the host. However if I move the instantiation to a local variable within the thread it works fine.

Based on what little I know so far about the problem, it would seem that the parent classes private member is not thread safe to access from the thread XMLRPCMethod. Again that is a guess at this point I wanted to bring it up in case I’m completely off in my investigation.

I patiently await your responses.

Also, if this is in fact a bug, where do I report the bug to be fixed in the next build?