I'm making an ecommerce application on Android and, as it is my first serious project, I'm trying to figure out beforehand the best approach to do this.

The application talks to a web service (magento api, meaning soap or xml rpc unfortunately) and gets all the content on the phone (product categories, product details, user credentials etc.). I think it should do lazy loading or something like that.

So, I was thinking to keep the user credentials in a custom Object which will be kept in a SharedPreferences so that every Activity cand easily access it. I'll use a couple of ListViews to show the content and AsyncTask to fetch the data needed. Should I keep all the data in memory in objects or should I use some sort of cache or a local database? Also, I'm planning to use a HashMap with SoftReferences to hold the bitmaps I am downloading. But wouldn't this eat a lot of memory?

How cand all the activities have access to all these objects (ecommerce basket etc.)? I'm thinking of passing them using Intents but this doesn't seem right to me. Can SharedPreferences be used for a lot of objects and are there any concurrency issues?

Any pointers would be really appreciated. What are some good guidelines? What classes should I look into? Do you know of any resources on the Internet for me to check out?