In this chapter, we built a different kind of project. We've had applications that run on Android, and some that run on the desktop. This one, though, runs on both platforms simultaneously. One is no good without the other. That requires that we build things a bit differently to make sure the two are synchronized. While there are a variety of ways to go about this, we chose to use a REST server on the phone, with the desktop acting as a REST client.
By the end of the chapter, we built an Android application that provides not only a user interface, but a background process (called Service), and embedded our REST server in the Android application using Jersey and its Java SE deployment option. You also learned how to interact with text (SMS) messages on Android using the system-provided Content Providers and platform APIs, and streaming those messages to the client using Server-Sent Events. We demonstrated how to send messages between processes/threads in Android using Intents, broadcasts...