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 5. Queuing Work with IntentService

We're building up quite a toolkit for asynchronous Android programming. We can perform work off the main thread and update the user interface using HandlerThread and Handler. If we're working in the context of a single Activity and want to show progress as we go, we can use AsyncTask. When we need to load data asynchronously and have it survive across Activity restarts, we can turn to Loaders.

What if we want to perform some background work that must complete even if the user exits the application?

Applications usually don't get killed immediately by the system, so we could just start a background thread and hope that the system doesn't kill our application before the work is completed.

However, this would be quite unreliable, and we can be sure that it won't work well on a large percentage of Android devices in the wild. Luckily, there is a solution available in the form of Service and its more specialized subclass IntentService.

In this chapter, we...