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

Introducing Loaders


As the name suggests, the job of Loader is to load data on behalf of other parts of the application, and to make that data available across activities and fragments within the same process. The Loaders framework was created to solve a couple of issues related to asynchronous loading in Activities and Fragments:

  • Background processing: The heavy lifting is automatically performed on a background thread, and the results are safely introduced to the main thread on completion.

  • Result caching: Loaded data can be cached and redelivered on repeat calls for speed and efficiency.

  • Lifecycle awareness: The framework gives us control over when a Loader instance is destroyed, and allows Loaders to live outside the Activity lifecycle, making their data available across the application and across Activity restarts.

  • Data change management: Loaders monitor their underlying data source, and reload their data in the background when necessary. The framework includes lifecycle callbacks that...