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Asynchronous Android

Asynchronous Android

By : Steve Liles
4.8 (4)
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Asynchronous Android

Asynchronous Android

4.8 (4)
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)
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Asynchronous Android
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
1
Index

Handler programming issues


The Handler class is truly fundamental to the Android platform and is used widely throughout, but there are plenty of ways we can get ourselves into trouble if we aren't careful.

Leaking implicit references

The biggest worry when using Handler within an Activity is resource leakage which, just as with AsyncTask, is very easy to do. Here's one of our earlier examples:

final Runnable runnable = new Runnable(){
    public void run() {
        // … do some work
    }
};
handler.postDelayed(runnable, TimeUnit.SECONDS.toMillis(10));

By declaring an anonymous inner Runnable inside an activity, we have made an implicit reference to that containing Activity instance. We've then posted the Runnable to a handler and told it to execute in 10 seconds time.

If the Activity finishes before the 10 seconds are up, it cannot yet be garbage collected because the implicit reference in our Runnable means that the Activity is still reachable by live objects.

So, although it makes for a concise...

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