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

Applications of IntentService


Ideal applications for IntentService include just about any long-running task where the work is not especially tied to the behavior of a Fragment or Activity, and particularly when the task must complete its processing regardless of whether the user exits the application.

However, IntentService is only suitable for situations where a single worker thread is sufficient to handle the workload, since it's work is processed by a single HandlerThread, and we cannot start more than one instance of the same IntentService subclass.

A usecase that IntentService is ideally suited for is uploading data to remote servers. An IntentService is a perfect fit because:

  • The upload usually must complete, even if the user leaves the application

  • A single upload at a time usually makes best use of the available connection, since bandwidth is often asymmetric (there is much smaller bandwidth for upload than download)

  • A single upload at a time gives us a better chance of completing each...