Asynchronous Android

Communicating with Services

In all of our dealings with Services so far, we have initiated work by invoking startService with an Intent, but that isn't our only option. If our Service is designed to only be used locally from within our own application process, we can take significant shortcuts and work with Service just as we do with any other Java object.

Direct communication with local Services

To create a Service that we can interact with directly, we must implement the onBind method that we previously ignored and from which we returned null. This time, we'll return an implementation of IBinder that provides direct access to the Service it binds. We'll always return the same IBinder as shown in the following code:

public class LocalPrimesService ...