title: Android object handling / persistence
body: <p>I am pretty far into my first Android application, and I have the sneaking suspicion that I'm "Doing It Wrong".  My app talks to a Ruby on Rails server and serializes objects back and forth via XML.  Before I knew what was happening, I found myself knee deep in writing my own crappy ORM, a problem which is compounded by the fact that I haven't written any Java since high school.</p>
  
  <p>My conflict here is that I want my client-side (android) app to be capable of serializing via a variety of methods, such as HTTP/XML, to a local database, or out to the local filesystem.  I started out with the Strategy pattern, but I feel like my solution is badly lacking.  </p>
  
  <p>For one, should I re-implement all of Rails model validation on the client side, because I don't know if I'm always going to be working with Rails on the other side?  The even bigger issue is that right now I can only represent flat objects as key-values, as my code can't handle nested objects like a true ORM.</p>
  
  <p>I'm sure Android devs deal with this all the time, so I'm interested to hear what other people do to cope with these issues.    </p>