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

Building responsive apps with Service


Throughout this book, we have learned about the concurrency constructs provided by the Android platform for doing work off the main thread. So, it might seem surprising that, by itself, Service does not provide any background threads and will run all of its callbacks directly on the main thread, just like Activity.

If we perform long-running work or block the main thread in a Service callback method, our application may be shut down, and a system-triggered Application Not Responding dialog is presented to the user.

While it is possible to configure the service to launch in a separate process, that process will still run the Service callbacks on its own main thread and will be subject to the same constraints. The only difference is that our foreground process will not be shut down along with the misbehaving Service process.

The solution, of course, is to pass the work off from the main thread to background "worker" threads.

IntentService, which we learned...