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 used Handler to queue work for the main thread to process, as a means of maintaining responsiveness in a single-threaded application.

We saw the different ways we can define work with Handler—arbitrary work defined at the call site with Runnable, or predefined work implemented in the Handler itself and triggered by message sending.

We learned how to use Handler in a multithreaded application to pass work and results back and forth between cooperating threads, performing blocking operations on an ordinary background thread, and communicating the results back to the main thread to update the user interface.

We also met HandlerThread and used it to create a background thread with its own Looper, allowing us to use these same techniques to queue work for background processing.

This isn't the last we'll see of Handler and HandlerThread—they can also be usefully put to work in other contexts, as we'll discover in Chapter 5, Queuing Work with IntentService and Chapter 6...