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 Services


With a little bit of work, Services give us the means to perform long-running background tasks, and free us from the tyranny of the Activity lifecycle. Unlike IntentService, directly subclassing Service also gives us the ability control the level of concurrency.

With the ability to run as many tasks as we need and to take as long as is necessary to complete those tasks, a world of new possibilities opens up.

The only real constraint on how and when we use Services comes from the need to communicate results to a user-interface component, such as a Fragment or Activity, and the complexity this entails.

Ideal use cases for Services tend to have the following characteristics:

  • Long-running (a few hundred milliseconds and upward)

  • Not specific to a single Activity or Fragment class

  • Must complete, even if the user leaves the application

  • Requires more concurrency than IntentService provides, or needs control over the level of concurrency

There are many applications that exhibit these...