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

Summary


In this chapter, we explored the very powerful Service component, putting it to use to execute long-running background tasks with a configurable level of concurrency.

We learned that running tasks in a Service gives them the best possible chance of successful completion if the user exits the application, because the system avoids killing processes with active Services unless absolutely necessary.

We discovered various ways to initiate background work in a Service, from starting the Service with an Intent object through to direct method invocation using local Services.

We also saw the wide range of communication mechanisms available for delivering results back to the user: direct invocation of local Service methods; sending Messages with Messenger; broadcasting results to registered parties with BroadcastReceiver; and, if the user has already left the application, raising system notifications.

Of course, we can also use PendingIntent to send data back to the originating Activity, just...