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

Chapter 3. Distributing Work with Handler and HandlerThread

In Chapter 2, Staying Responsive with AsyncTask, we familiarized ourselves with the most well-known concurrency construct of the Android platform. What is perhaps less well known are the mechanics of how AsyncTask coordinates work between background threads and the main thread.

In this chapter we'll meet some of the lower-level constructs that AsyncTask builds on to get its work done.

We'll see how to defer tasks to happen in the future on the main thread, whether that is as soon as possible, after a specified delay, or at a specified time, and we'll apply the same concepts to scheduling work on background threads and coordinating the results with the main thread.

In this chapter we will cover the following topics:

  • Understanding Looper

  • Building responsive apps with Handler

  • Scheduling work with post

  • Canceling a pending Runnable

  • Scheduling work with send

  • Canceling pending Messages

  • Multithreaded programming with Handler

  • Building responsive...