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 explored the incredibly useful IntentService—an ideal construct for performing long-running background tasks off the main thread, surviving well beyond the lifecycle of the initiating Activity, and even continuing to do useful work when the application is no longer in the foreground.

We learned how to send work to an IntentService with parameterized Intents, how to process that work in the background by implementing onHandleIntent, and how to send results back to the originating Activity using a PendingIntent.

For cases where the application is no longer in the foreground or an operation is particularly long-running, we saw how to post notifications to the notification drawer, complete with progress updates.

In the next chapter, we'll use IntentService's superclass—Service—to perform work on multiple background threads even when the host application is not in the foreground.