Book Image

Android High Performance Programming

By : Emil Atanasov, Enrique López Mañas, Diego Grancini
Book Image

Android High Performance Programming

By: Emil Atanasov, Enrique López Mañas, Diego Grancini

Overview of this book

Performant applications are one of the key drivers of success in the mobile world. Users may abandon an app if it runs slowly. Learning how to build applications that balance speed and performance with functionality and UX can be a challenge; however, it's now more important than ever to get that balance right. Android High Performance will start you thinking about how to wring the most from any hardware your app is installed on, so you can increase your reach and engagement. The book begins by providing an introduction to state–of-the-art Android techniques and the importance of performance in an Android application. Then, we will explain the Android SDK tools regularly used to debug and profile Android applications. We will also learn about some advanced topics such as building layouts, multithreading, networking, and security. Battery life is one of the biggest bottlenecks in applications; and this book will show typical examples of code that exhausts battery life, how to prevent this, and how to measure battery consumption from an application in every kind of situation to ensure your apps don’t drain more than they should. This book explains techniques for building optimized and efficient systems that do not drain the battery, cause memory leaks, or slow down with time.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Android High Performance Programming
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Initial concepts


Before we start creating our first native application, we would like to introduce some initial concepts to the reader, to ensure easier understanding:

  • ndk-build: This file is the shell script in charge of invoking the NDK build. Automatically, this script checks that the system and the application is right, is generating the binaries that will be used, and copying them to our project structure. Being a shell script, it can be called with a few extra parameters:

    • clean: This parameter makes the script clean all the binaries that have been previously generated

    • –B: Using the –B option, we force the system to perform a rebuild

    • V=1: This releases the build and also displays build commands

    • NDK_DEBUG=X: If we use 1, the build will be debuggable; if we use 0, we will be forcing a release build

    • NDK_LOG=X: Using 1, NDK will log all the messages that are generated during the build

    Keep in mind that all the parameters can be partially combined (for instance, you could use B V=1 if you...