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 learned to schedule work for our applications to perform at some time in the future, either as a one-off operation or at regular intervals.

We learned to set alarms relative to the system clock or real time, how to wake the device up from a deep sleep, and how to cancel alarms when we no longer need them.

Our exploration covered various options for responding to alarms, including bringing an Activity to the foreground or doing work directly in a BroadcastReceiver, synchronously or asynchronously.

Finally, we arranged for a Service to be launched with a WakeLock to keep the CPU from powering down while our long-running background work is completed.

Over the course of this book, we've armed ourselves with a powerful array of tools for building responsive Android applications. We discovered that it is incredibly important to shift as much work as possible off the main thread, and explored a number of constructs and techniques for doing that.

We now know how to move short...