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


The Loader framework in Android does a wonderful job of making it easy to load data in the background and deliver it to the main thread when it is ready.

In this chapter we learned about the essential characteristics of all Loaders—background loading, caching of loaded data, and a managed lifecycle.

We took a detailed look at AsyncTaskLoader as a means to perform arbitrary background loading, and CursorLoader for asynchronous loading from local database Cursors.

We saw that Loaders can free us from some of the constraints imposed by the Activity lifecycle, and took advantage of that to continue to work in the background even across Activity restarts.

In the next chapter we'll free ourselves completely from the constraints of the Activity lifecycle and perform long-running background operations with IntentService, even when our app is no longer in the foreground.