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

Communicating with Services


In all of our dealings with Services so far, we have initiated work by invoking startService with an Intent, but that isn't our only option. If our Service is designed to only be used locally from within our own application process, we can take significant shortcuts and work with Service just as we do with any other Java object.

Direct communication with local Services

To create a Service that we can interact with directly, we must implement the onBind method that we previously ignored and from which we returned null. This time, we'll return an implementation of IBinder that provides direct access to the Service it binds. We'll always return the same IBinder as shown in the following code:

public class LocalPrimesService extends Service {
  public class Access extends Binder {
    public LocalPrimesService getService() {
      return LocalPrimesService.this;
    }
  };
  private final Access binder = new Access();

  @Override
  public IBinder onBind(Intent intent...