Book Image

Asynchronous Android

By : Steve Liles
Book Image

Asynchronous Android

By: Steve Liles

Overview of this book

With more than a million apps available from Google Play, it is more important than ever to build apps that stand out from the crowd. To be successful, apps must react quickly to user input, deliver results in a flash, and sync data in the background. The key to this is understanding the right way to implement asynchronous operations that work with the platform, instead of against it. Asynchronous Android is a practical book that guides you through the concurrency constructs provided by the Android platform, illustrating the applications, benefits, and pitfalls of each.Learn to use AsyncTask correctly to perform operations in the background, keeping user-interfaces running smoothly while avoiding treacherous memory leaks. Discover Handler, HandlerThread and Looper, the related and fundamental building blocks of asynchronous programming in Android. Escape from the constraints of the Activity lifecycle to load and cache data efficiently across your entire application with the Loader framework. Keep your data fresh with scheduled tasks, and understand how Services let your application continue to run in the background, even when the user is busy with something else.Asynchronous Android will help you to build well-behaved apps with smooth, responsive user-interfaces that delight users with speedy results and data that's always fresh, and keep the system happy and the battery charged by playing by the rules.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Asynchronous Android
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we learned that Google takes the efficiency of the Android platform very seriously. We also looked at the extraordinary lengths they go to in order to ensure a smooth user experience, evidencing the importance of building responsive applications.

We discussed the Android thread model and the measures that the platform may take to protect the user from apps that misbehave or are not sufficiently responsive.

Finally, we gained an overview of the general approach to building responsive apps through concurrency, and learned some of the issues faced by developers of concurrent software in general and Android applications in particular.

In the next chapter, we'll start to build responsive applications by applying the infamous AsyncTask instance to execute work in the background using pools of threads, and return progress updates and results to the main thread.