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

Building responsive apps with AsyncTaskLoader


AsyncTaskLoader is a Loader implementation that uses AsyncTasks to perform its background work, though this is largely hidden from us when we implement our own subclasses.

We don't need to trouble ourselves about the AsyncTasks—they are completely hidden by AsyncTaskLoader—but with what we learned earlier about AsyncTask, it is interesting to note that tasks are executed using AsyncTask.THREAD_POOL_EXECUTOR to ensure a high degree of concurrency when multiple Loaders are in use.

Loader is generically typed so, when we implement it, we need to specify the type of object that it will load—in our case android.graphics.Bitmap:

public class ThumbnailLoader extends AsyncTaskLoader<Bitmap> {
    // ...
}

The Loader abstract class requires a Context passed to its constructor, so we must pass a Context up the chain. We'll also need to know which thumbnail to load, so we'll also pass an identifier, mediaId:

private Integer mediaId;
public ThumbnailLoader...