Book Image

Asynchronous Android Programming - Second Edition

By : Steve Liles
Book Image

Asynchronous Android Programming - Second Edition

By: Steve Liles

Overview of this book

Asynchronous programming has acquired immense importance in Android programming, especially when we want to make use of the number of independent processing units (cores) available on the most recent Android devices. With this guide in your hands you’ll be able to bring the power of Asynchronous programming to your own projects, and make your Android apps more powerful than ever before! To start with, we will discuss the details of the Android Process model and the Java Low Level Concurrent Framework, delivered by Android SDK. We will also guide you through the high-level Android-specific constructs available on the SDK: Handler, AsyncTask, and Loader. Next, we will discuss the creation of IntentServices, Bound Services and External Services, which can run in the background even when the user is not interacting with it. You will also discover AlarmManager and JobScheduler APIs, which are used to schedule and defer work without sacrificing the battery life. In a more advanced phase, you will create background tasks that are able to execute CPU-intensive tasks in a native code-making use of the Android NDK. You will be then guided through the process of interacting with remote services asynchronously using the HTTP protocol or Google GCM Platform. Using the EventBus library, we will also show how to use the Publish-Subscribe software pattern to simplify communication between the different Android application components by decoupling the event producer from event consumer. Finally, we will introduce RxJava, a popular asynchronous Java framework used to compose work in a concise and reactive way. Asynchronous Android will help you to build well-behaved applications with smooth responsive user interfaces that delight the users with speedy results and data that’s always fresh.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Asynchronous Android Programming Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
2
Performing Work with Looper, Handler, and HandlerThread
Index

Chapter 2. Performing Work with Looper, Handler, and HandlerThread

In the previous chapter, you were introduced to the most basic concurrent issues that a developer might face while developing a responsive and concurrent Android application. As the most interactable items run on the main thread, it is crucial to coordinate the backgrounds code to handle the work without any UI stuttering that compromises the user experience.

In this chapter, we will meet some of most fundamental constructs used on Android systems to perform tasks and schedule on a main thread or an ordinary background thread created by the developer to perform and schedule tasks long-running operations.

We will cover the following topics:

  • Understanding Looper

  • Understanding Handler

  • Sending work to Looper

  • Scheduling work with post

  • Using Handler to defer work

  • Leaking implicit references

  • Leaking explicit references

  • Updating the UI with Handler

  • Canceling pending messages

  • Multithreading with Handler and HandlerThread

  • Applications of Handler...