Book Image

Mastering Android Development with Kotlin

By : Miloš Vasić
Book Image

Mastering Android Development with Kotlin

By: Miloš Vasić

Overview of this book

Kotlin is a programming language intended to be a better Java, and it's designed to be usable and readable across large teams with different levels of knowledge. As a language, it helps developers build amazing Android applications in an easy and effective way. This book begins by giving you a strong grasp of Kotlin's features in the context of Android development and its APIs. Moving on, you'll take steps towards building stunning applications for Android. The book will show you how to set up the environment, and the difficulty level will grow steadily with the applications covered in the upcoming chapters. Later on, the book will introduce you to the Android Studio IDE, which plays an integral role in Android development. We'll use Kotlin's basic programming concepts such as functions, lambdas, properties, object-oriented code, safety aspects, type parameterization, testing, and concurrency, which will guide you through writing Kotlin code in production. We'll also show you how to integrate Kotlin into any existing Android project.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Service categorization


Before we define the Android service categorization and dive deeper into each type, we must answer the question of what Android service really is. Well, Android service is a mechanism provided by the Android Framework by which we can move the execution of long running tasks to the background. Android service provides some nice additional features that can make a developer's work more flexible and easier. To explain how it will make our development easier, we will create a service by extending our Journaler application.

Android service is an application component that does not have any UI. It can be started by any Android application component and continue running as long as it's needed, even if we leave our application or kill it.

There are three main types of Android services:

  • Foreground
  • Background
  • Bound

Foreground Android services

A foreground service performs tasks that are noticeable to the end user. These services must display a status bar icon. They continue running...