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

Summary


In this chapter, we learned to schedule work for our applications to perform at some time in the distant future, either as a one-shot 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 doze mode, how to cancel alarms when we no longer need them, and how to set exact alarms on the most recent Android versions.

In the meantime, we introduced the reader to Doze Mode, a new power management feature that saves battery cycles by deferring jobs and tasks to a maintenance window. We learned how to test our alarms taking into account the new power management states introduced by the doze mode.

We learned how to debug alarms created with AlarmManager and how to analyze the information printed from the dumpsys commands.

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...